Then he [Philip] addressed the Spanish lords who were about him, and told them they must at once forget all the customs of Spain, and live in all respects after the English fashion, in which he was determined to begin and show them the way; so he ordered some beer to be brought to him, and drank of it.
Simon Renard could reflect with satisfaction on the virtual extinction of the house of Suffolk, but he would not feel quite easy in his mind until two more heads had rolled, those of ‘the two persons most able to cause trouble in the realm’ – Courtenay and Elizabeth. Not that the ambassador anticipated any difficulty over this. As he told the Emperor, ‘at present there is no other occupation than the cutting off of heads’, and now that the Queen had at last realized the folly of showing mercy to her enemies, she was ‘absolutely determined to have strict justice done’. Courtenay was already back in the Tower and Elizabeth would soon be joining him.
Throughout the recent crisis Elizabeth had remained holed up at Ashridge, suffering, so she said, from such a cold and headache as she had never felt before. On 26 January, the day after Wyatt entered Rochester, the Council had written summoning the princess to Court for her own safety, in case ‘any sudden tumult’ should arise in the neighbourhood of Ashridge. But Elizabeth had replied that she was far too ill to travel. All the same, rumours were flying about that she was planning to move further away from London, to Donnington Castle, a semi-fortified house near Newbury; that Ashridge was being provisioned for a siege and that Elizabeth was gathering troops – her household, it was said, was now eating in a week what normally lasted a month. Stephen Gardiner, convinced that the French ambassador was heavily involved with Wyatt, had resorted to highway robbery on one of de Noailles’ couriers and the resultant haul had included a copy of Elizabeth’s last letter to the Queen on its way to France by diplomatic bag. It therefore seemed reasonable to deduce that the Queen’s heir was in secret correspondence with the emissaries of a foreign power. Just how important a part she had played in Wyatt’s conspiracy remained to be seen. Her name had never been openly invoked but there could be no doubt that she, if anyone, stood to gain from its success. Now it had failed, she had some explaining to do.
Mary, already deeply suspicious of her sister’s convenient ‘illness’, sent two of her own physicians to examine the patient and report on her condition, and on 10 February the medical team was reinforced by a commission headed by Lord William Howard, Elizabeth’s maternal great-uncle. The doctors having pronounced her fit to travel, the commissioners felt justified in requiring her, in the Queen’s name and all excuses set apart, to be ready to leave with them on the following day. The invalid herself was found to be ‘very willing and conformable’, but afraid that her weakness was so great that she would not be able to endure the journey without peril of life. Elizabeth, aware that the peril lay not in the journey but its destination, begged for a further respite – ‘until she had better recovered her strength’. But when it was politely but firmly made clear that the time for such delaying tactics was over, she gave in with becoming meekness.
Although, for obvious reasons, she was making the most of it, there is no doubt that her illness on this occasion was perfectly genuine. From the description of her symptoms – her face and limbs were so distended that she was ‘a sad sight to see’ – Elizabeth appears to have been suffering from acute nephritis and it has been suggested that she may have had an attack of scarlet fever, of which inflammation of the kidneys is sometimes a complication. But however great her physical discomfort, it can scarcely have compared with her mental anguish. The situation she had been dreading ever since Mary’s accession had become a reality and there could be no disguising the fact that she stood in mortal danger.
In deference to his charge’s fragile state of health, William Howard had planned the thirty-mile journey from Ashridge in very easy stages, expecting it to take five days; but he had reckoned without Elizabeth’s talent for procrastination and it was getting on for a fortnight before the cavalcade began the descent of Highgate Hill into the city. Simon Renard reported that Elizabeth, who was dressed all in white, had the curtains of her litter drawn back ‘to show herself to the people’. According to Renard, she ‘kept a proud, haughty expression’ which, in his opinion, was assumed to hid her ‘vexation’. It may also have masked fear and revulsion – certainly the sights which greeted her as she was carried through Smithfield and on down Fleet Street towards Westminster can have done little to raise her spirits. Gallows had been erected all over London, from Bermondsey and Southwark in the east to Charing Cross and Hyde Park Corner in the west, and the city gates were decorated with severed heads and dismembered corpses – an intentionally grim reminder of the consequences of unsuccessful rebellion.
When Elizabeth reached Whitehall the portents were not encouraging. Mary refused to see her and she was lodged in a part of the palace from which, said Renard, neither she nor her servants could go out without passing the guard. There she remained for nearly a month, a prisoner in fact if not in name. Renard could not understand the delay in sending her to the Tower, since, he wrote, ‘she has been accused by Wyatt, mentioned by name in the French ambassador’s letters, suspected by her own councillors, and it is certain that the enterprise was undertaken for her sake.’
But evidence linking the princess with the insurrection was proving disappointingly hard to come by. Wyatt, who was being rigorously interrogated, admitted having sent her two letters; one advising her to retreat to Donnington, the other informing her of his arrival at Southwark. Francis Russell, the Earl of Bedford’s son, confessed to acting as postman, but the replies, if any, had been verbal and non-committal. Sir James Crofts, another of the conspirators now in custody, had been to see Elizabeth at Ashridge and had apparently incriminated William Saintlow, one of the gentlemen of her household. But Saintlow denied knowing anything about Wyatt’s plans, ‘protesting that he was a true man, both to God and his prince’. Crofts, too, although ‘marvellously tossed’, failed to reveal any really useful information. Even the discovery of that letter in de Noailles’ post-bag was not in itself evidence against Elizabeth. There was nothing in her handwriting; nothing to show that she herself had given it to de Noailles or had instructed anyone else to do so.
On 15 March Wyatt was at last brought to trial and convicted. Next day, it was the Friday before Palm Sunday, Elizabeth received a visit from Stephen Gardiner and nineteen other members of the Council, who ‘burdened her with Wyatt’s conspiracy’ as well as with ‘the business made by Sir Peter Carew and the rest of the gentlemen of the West Country’. It was the Queen’s pleasure, they told her, that she should now go to the Tower while the matter was further tried and examined. Elizabeth was appalled. She denied all the charges made against her, adding desperately that she trusted the Queen’s majesty would be a more gracious lady unto her than to send her to ‘so notorious and doleful a place’. But it seemed the Queen was ‘fully determined’. Elizabeth’s own servants were removed and six of the Queen’s people appointed to wait on her and ensure that ‘none should have access to her grace’. A hundred soldiers from the north in white coats watched and warded in the palace gardens all that night, and a great fire was lit in the hall, where ‘two certain lords’ kept guard with their company.
The twenty-year-old Elizabeth, lying awake in the darkness listening to the tramp of feet beneath her window, knew that the net was closing around her. Within a very few hours, failing some miracle, she would be in that doleful place from which so few prisoners of the blood royal ever emerged alive. But when the two lords, Sussex and Winchester, came for her in the morning, she made it clear that she was not going to go quietly. She did not believe, she said, that the Queen knew anything about the plan to send her to the Tower. It was the Council’s doing and especially the Lord Chancellor’s, who hated her. She begged again for an interview with her sister and, when this was refused, at least to be allowed to write to her. Winchester would have refused this, too, but the Earl of Sussex suddenly relented. Kneeling to the prisoner, he exclaimed that her grace should have liberty to write and, as he was a true man, he would deliver the letter to the Queen and bring an answer, ‘whatsoever came thereof’.
It might well be the most important letter of Elizabeth’s life, it might be the last letter she would ever write and she must write quickly, while her escort hovered impatiently in the background. Her pen flowed smoothly over the first page, in sentences polished during a sleepless night. ‘If any ever did try this old saying’, she began, ‘that a king’s word was more than another man’s oath, I most humbly beseech your Majesty to verify it in me, and to remember your last promise and my last demand, that I be not condemned without answer and due proof, which it seems that now I am; for that without cause proved I am by your Council from you commanded to go into the Tower, a place more wonted for a false traitor than a true subject’. Elizabeth had never ‘practised, counselled nor consented’ anything that might be prejudicial to the Queen’s person or dangerous to the state, and she beseeched Mary to hear her answer in person ‘and not suffer me to trust to your councillors’.
It might be dangerous to remind the Queen of Thomas Seymour. Mary would know all about that old scandal and probably believed the worst about it, but Elizabeth decided to risk it. ‘I have heard in my time’, she went on, ‘of many cast away for want of coming to the presence of their prince; and in late days I heard my lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered; but the persuasions were made to him too great, that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived, and that made him give his consent to his death … I pray God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other.’
So far so good, but as she turned over the page mistakes and corrections began to come thick and fast. Perhaps Sussex was at her elbow now, urging her to make haste. ‘I humbly crave to speak with your Highness’, scribbled Elizabeth, ‘which I would not be so bold to desire if I knew not myself most clear as I know myself most true. And as for the traitor Wyatt, he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him. And for the copy of my letter sent to the French king, I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token or letter by any means. And to this my truth I will stand to my death.’ There was nothing more to be said, but more than half her second sheet was left blank – plenty of space for someone to add a forged confession or damaging admission – so Elizabeth scored the page with diagonal lines before adding a final appeal at the very end. ‘I humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself. Your Highness’s most faithful subject that hath been from the beginning and will be to my end, Elizabeth.’
As it turned out, she might have saved herself the trouble. When her sister’s letter was brought to her, Mary flew into a royal Tudor rage. She roared at Sussex that he would never have dared to do such a thing in her father’s time and wished, in a triumph of illogicality, that he were alive again if only for a month. Even so, Elizabeth had won a brief respite, for she had managed to miss the tide. The starlings which supported the piers of London Bridge restricted the flow of the river and turned the water beneath it into a mill-race. ‘Shooting the bridge’ was always a hazardous business but when the tide was flooding it became impossible – there could be a difference of as much as five feet in the level of the water. The Council were not going to risk taking the princess through the streets, so it was decided to wait until the following morning. When Sussex and Winchester arrived at nine o’clock there was no question of further delay, but as Elizabeth was hurried through the gardens to the landing-stage, she looked up at the windows of the palace as if hoping to catch a glimpse of the Queen. There was no sign. Mary was in church on Palm Sunday morning. The party embarked at the privy stairs, the barge was cast off and rowed away downstream – down towards the grey, ghost-ridden bulk of the Tower. There her mother had died and her mother’s cousin, poor wanton Catherine Howard; her own cousin Jane, with whom Elizabeth had once shared lessons and gone to children’s parties, and so many others – the Seymour brothers, John Dudley, ‘that great devil’, and Suffolk, the weak fool. Behind them rose the wraiths of all those shadowy Plantagenet cousins, sacrificed to make England safe for the Tudors. This had been journey’s end for them all. Was it to be the end of her journey, too?
The boatmen were shipping their oars and tying up at the Water Gate – Traitor’s Gate. At first Elizabeth refused to land. She was no traitor, besides she would get her feet wet. Winchester told her brutally that she had no choice. He offered her his cloak – it was raining hard – but the princess rejected it ‘with a good dash’ and then, with one foot on the stairs, cried out: ‘Here landeth as true a subject being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs; and before thee, O God, I speak it, having none other friends but thee alone!’ A company of soldiers and Tower warders were drawn up on the landing stage and Elizabeth immediately appealed to them to bear witness to her innocence and loyalty. She was rewarded by several voices crying from the ranks ‘God preserve your grace!’ and, turning to the Lord Chamberlain, Sir John Gage, asked if all these harnessed men were for her. ‘No madam’, came the reply and someone else explained that it was the custom for the reception of any prisoner. But Elizabeth would not have her effect spoilt. ‘Yes’, she insisted mournfully, ‘I know it is so. It needed not for me, being, alas! but a weak woman.’ And, to emphasize this point, she sank down exhaustedly on a convenient stone. ‘Madam, you were best to come out of the rain’, said the Lieutenant of the Tower, ‘for you sit unwholesomely.’ ‘Better sitting here than in a worse place’, answered Elizabeth, ‘for God knoweth, I know not, whither you will bring me.’ This was too much for her gentleman usher, who burst into tears and was promptly rounded on by his mistress demanding to know what he meant ‘so uncomfortably to use her’. She knew her truth to be such that no man had cause to weep for her. Then, her courage restored, or satisfied perhaps that she had wrung every drop out of the situation, she got up from her wet stone and allowed herself to be escorted into the fortress.
She was lodged in a room in the Bell Tower, and Winchester and Sir John Gage began to lock the doors ‘very straitly’ and to discuss further security arrangements. But the Earl of Sussex, who all along had shown himself more compassionate, or more far-sighted, intervened. They would be wise, he remarked, to remember that ‘this was the King our master’s daughter’ as well as the Queen’s sister. ‘Therefore’, said Sussex, ‘let us use such dealing that we may answer it hereafter, if it shall so happen; for just dealing is always answerable.’ This shrewd reminder that their prisoner might yet become their Queen went home, and the others departed rather subdued.
Elizabeth might have been cheered if she had known just how deeply the government was divided on the question of her future, and that it was only after long and heated debate and because nobody would accept responsibility for her safekeeping, that the decision to send her to the Tower had been taken. Sussex told her that several members of the Council were sorry for her trouble and he himself was sorry he had lived to see this day; but now, abandoned in the prison that seemed only too likely soon to become her grave, there was not much comfort to be gained by mere sympathy. Years later she was to tell a foreign ambassador how, having no hope of life, she had planned to beg the Queen as a last favour to have a French swordsman brought over for her execution, as had been done for her mother – anything rather than suffer the hideous butchery of the axe.
All this time preparations for the Queen’s marriage had been going forward and the only thing lacking now was the presence of the bridegroom, but Simon Renard, only too conscious of his heavy responsibilities, felt serious doubts as to the wisdom of allowing Philip to hazard his precious person in such an ungrateful and heresy-ridden land – at least while it continued to harbour Elizabeth Tudor and Edward Courtenay. In Renard’s opinion a more than suspicious negligence was being shown over bringing these two ‘great persons’ to trial, and he could only conclude that delay was being deliberately created in the hope that something would crop up to save them. The ambassador saw the Queen on Easter Saturday and took the opportunity of expressing some of his misgivings, adding that until ‘every necessary step’ had been taken he would not feel able to recommend the prince’s coming to England. The threat was implicit and Mary replied, with tears in her eyes, that ‘she would rather never have been born than that any harm should be done to his Highness.’ She promised to see to it that Elizabeth’s and Courtenay’s trials were over before his arrival.
This was all very well but, although Renard continued to press the matter, it seemed there was still not enough evidence against either of the suspects even to begin proceedings. As far as Courtenay was concerned, the circumstances were certainly suggestive, but the fact remained that he had not actually done anything. He had not gone down to the West Country. He had not, at any time, taken up arms against the Queen. He had not attempted to escape. The plan to marry him to Elizabeth had been openly raised by William Paget the previous autumn, but Courtenay had rejected it on the grounds that such a match would be unworthy of his unblemished lineage. As for Elizabeth, Renard was obliged to report that the laws of England did not provide penalties applicable to her ‘because those with whom she plotted are fugitives’. ‘Nevertheless’, he went on, ‘the Queen tells me that fresh proof is coming up against her every day, and there were several witnesses to assert that she had gathered together stores and weapons in order to rise with the rest and fortify a house in the country whither she had been sending her provisions.’ The house in the country was, presumably, Donnington, but this promising line of enquiry had turned into a blind alley and Elizabeth swore that any defensive preparations made at Ashridge were simply as a protection against the Duke of Suffolk who had been in the neighbourhood at the time. Frustrating though it might be for those like Renard and Stephen Gardiner, who believed that as long as Elizabeth lived there would be no peace in England, the government was no nearer to making out a case against her than it had been two months earlier.
On 11 April Thomas Wyatt, who had been kept alive in the hope that he might yet be induced to incriminate his fellow prisoners, was executed at last and on the scaffold he explicitly exonerated both Elizabeth and Courtenay from any guilty knowledge of the rebellion. Although the authorities tried to suppress it, this news spread rapidly and joyfully through the city and it was now clear that there would be very little chance of ever securing a conviction against the princess. A mere detail like lack of proof might not have mattered in the days of the Queen’s father or grandfather, but Mary possessed none of the ruthless self-confidence which had characterized her progenitors. Already, to Simon Renard’s barely suppressed annoyance, she was beginning to pardon her rebels and this despite the fact that open opposition to her policies, her religion and her marriage was already beginning to reappear. Violent incidents in churches and physical attacks on priests saying mass were on the increase; and inflammatory pamphlets had begun to circulate in the capital – one urging all Englishmen to stand firm and keep out the Prince of Spain, another ‘as seditious as possible and in favour of the Lady Elizabeth’. Even the children were joining in rough games where the ‘Spaniards’ were always heavily defeated.
To make matters worse, the Council, an unwieldy and cantankerous body, was split from top to bottom. ‘Quarrels, jealousy and ill-will have increased among the councillors’, wrote Renard on 22 April, ‘becoming so public that several of them, out of spite, no longer attend the meetings. What one does, another undoes; what one advises, another opposes; one strives to save Courtenay, another Elizabeth; and such is the confusion that one can only expect the upshot to be arms and tumult.’ Renard believed that the Queen would soon be persuaded to release Courtenay altogether while, as for Elizabeth, it had now been officially admitted that the lawyers could not find sufficient evidence to condemn her and she was already being allowed out to walk in the Tower gardens, so it looked as if her release, too, was only a matter of time.
Elizabeth owed her preservation to a number of factors – her own impenetrable discretion, the strength of public opinion, government weakness and lack of direction – but most of all she owed it to her sister. Mary’s opinion of her had not changed – early in March she told Renard sourly that ‘Elizabeth’s character was just what she had always believed it to be’ – but, in spite of her deep-rooted personal dislike and distrust of the girl and in spite of the pressure being exerted on her most vulnerable flank, the Queen had stuck stubbornly to her principles. Her conscience had forced her to insist on a thorough and painstaking enquiry, thus creating the very delay which Renard knew would be fatal, and as long as the case remained ‘not proven’ Elizabeth would continue to get the benefit of the doubt.
The problem now arose of what was to be done with the princess. She could not be left in the Tower indefinitely; neither would it be politic to set her free, and the Queen could scarcely be expected to receive her at Court – nor yet at any rate. Some sort of face-saving formula would have to be found and Mary eventually fell back on the time-honoured expedient of sending her sister to live under restraint in a remote country house. After a good deal of indecision, the manor of Woodstock, a hunting-lodge once much favoured by the Plantagenets, was selected, although Renard would have preferred some more secure northern castle. Elizabeth had now been consigned to the custody of Sir Henry Bedingfield, a stolid, staunchly Catholic gentleman from Oxborough in Norfolk, whose loyalty to the Queen could not be questioned, and on 19 May she left the Tower under his escort to a salute of guns from the merchants of the Steelyard and the cheers of the Londoners, who believed she had been released. The journey to Woodstock, although accomplished in a warped and broken litter, rapidly developed into something suspiciously like a triumphal progress. At Windsor the townsfolk turned out en masse to see her pass; at Eton she was nearly mobbed by the scholars and church bells were rung defiantly in many villages along the route, while everywhere the country people crowded to the roadside to cry blessings on her, to throw cakes and flowers into her lap and wish her Godspeed.
At the end of the month Mary also left London, thankful to escape from that insolent, irreligious city where she spent her days struggling with the Council, surrounded by an almost tangible miasma of treachery and deceit which she was yet powerless to disperse. No wonder she longed for a husband who would relieve her of the burden of government – a burden she was beginning to find insupportable. The Queen’s destination was Richmond, from where she was expecting soon to ride south to meet her bridegroom. It had been agreed that Philip should land at Southampton and the wedding take place in Winchester Cathedral – no one felt like risking a ceremony in London – but May turned into June and Philip was still in Spain paying a leisurely round of farewell visits. By the beginning of July the delay was becoming embarrassing. Mary told Renard that it was painful to her because it encouraged the heretics, but there was deeper pain in the sense of rejection.
All the same, Philip can scarcely be blamed for his dilatoriness. It was not only that his bride was a delicate, middle-aged woman to whom he referred in a letter to his friend Ruy Gomez as ‘our dear and well-beloved aunt’ – that was just the luck of the draw in the lottery of royal marriage. Far more off-putting were the prospects of humiliation in a strange land. By the terms of the marriage treaty he was debarred from taking any independent part in the government; he could appoint no officials, send no English money abroad. He was forbidden to bring any Spanish troops with him – he would in fact be a mere cipher, his wife’s husband and nothing more. This was bad enough, but even more galling to a young man like Philip, who hid his shyness under a stiff public manner, was the anxious, constantly repeated advice from his father, from his father’s ministers and from Simon Renard, to sink his pride and strain every nerve to conciliate the ungrateful, heretical islanders. He must be affable and show himself to the people. He must be lavish with presents as well as smiles. He must bring as few as possible of his own friends and servants and resign himself to being served by clumsy, suspicious strangers – all the harder since he spoke no English. Those Spaniards who did accompany him must on no account bring their wives, for they were more likely to cause trouble even than soldiers. For the sake of the alliance, he and his retinue must be prepared to put up with insult and anything else the English might choose to throw at them. Small wonder then that Philip lingered, finding excuses of ‘business’ to keep him in Spain, until at last the iron sense of duty which drove him throughout his life would let him delay no longer. He sailed from Corunna on 13 July and six days later, on the anniversary of Mary’s accession, his fleet was dropping anchor in Southampton Water.
The prince came ashore on the afternoon of 20 July to be greeted not by insult or hostile crowds but, in far more typically English fashion, by a persistent downpour of fine summer rain. He rested in Southampton over the weekend and on Monday set out on the ten-mile ride to Winchester. The rain which had been falling steadily for three days managed to penetrate even the thick red felt cloak he wore over his black velvet and white satin finery, so that he was obliged to stop at the Hospital of St Cross to change. The laggard bridegroom was still, it seemed, in no hurry. On arriving at Winchester he went first to the cathedral, where there was such a crowd of sightseers eager to catch a glimpse of him that several people were nearly suffocated in the crush, and it was past ten o’clock before he made his way by torchlight through the gardens to the Bishop’s Palace where the Queen was waiting.
They met in the long gallery, he kissing her on the mouth in ‘English fashion’ and then, she taking him by the hand, they sat together under the cloth of estate talking in a mixture of French and Spanish. That first meeting was short and informal but Philip, who was doing his utmost to ingratiate himself (even to the extent of forcing himself to drink beer), insisted on kissing all the Queen’s ladies ‘so as not to break the custom of the country, which is a good one’. He asked Mary to teach him what he should say to the lords in English at his departing and she told him to say ‘good night my lords all’ – a formula which he carefully repeated before leaving for his lodgings in the Dean’s house. Next day he came to see his fiancée again, with more ceremony this time, although they had another quarter of an hour’s private talk ‘each of them merrily smiling on the other, to the great comfort and rejoicing of the beholders’.
No one was in any doubt as to what the Queen thought of Philip and in general he was making a good impression. His appearance was in his favour, for he was a small, slender man with reassuringly un-foreign blue eyes and fair complexion. Some people thought his yellow hair and beard made him look like a Fleming and the Flemings had always been popular in England. What Philip thought of his bride he kept to himself but in their letters home the other Spaniards were less discreet. The Queen was a dear, good creature but older than they had been led to expect. She was a perfect saint but dressed badly. She was certainly not beautiful and had no eyebrows. Ruy Gomez thought she might look better and less flabby if she adopted Spanish fashions but, he went on, it was just as well Philip understood that the marriage had been arranged for political and not fleshly considerations, for this elderly virgin would obviously give him no satisfaction in bed.
The Queen of England and the Prince of Spain were married in Winchester Cathedral on 25 July with all the solemn ritual, all the pomp and splendour proper to the occasion. The flickering tapers glinted on the gorgeous clothes of the wedding guests and the rich vestments of the officiating clergy – six bishops, coped and mitred – on the sumptuous velvet and satin, on the jewels and the gleaming altar plate; but Mary’s wedding ring was, by her own request, a plain gold band with no stone in it ‘because maidens were so married in old times’. After high mass, during which the Queen remained wrapt and motionless, her eyes never leaving the sacrament, the heralds announced in Latin, French and English, the impressive list of the newly married couple’s styles and titles: Philip and Marie, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Hapsburg, Flanders and Tyrol. But to Mary only two things mattered – that at last she was married and was already helplessly in love.
The King and Queen walked hand-in-hand under the canopy of state back to the Bishop’s Palace for the wedding feast with its quantities of elaborate food and displays of gold plate, the musicians playing in the background and the heralds crying largesse. There was dancing afterwards and then, when darkness had fallen, the Bishop of Winchester blessed the marriage bed and the newly-weds were left alone. ‘What happened that night only they know’, observed one of the Spaniards eagerly, but ‘if they give us a son our joy will be complete.’
The Court stayed at Winchester till the end of the month, the Queen, according to custom, not appearing in public. The Spaniards amused themselves sightseeing and lounging in the antechamber, talking or dancing or playing cards with the Queen’s ladies. None were beautiful by Spanish standards, although some were better than others and at least it helped to pass the time. On the thirty-first the household was on the move towards London, going by way of Basing, Reading and Windsor, where Philip was installed as a Garter knight. ‘Their majesties are the happiest couple in the world’, wrote someone enthusiastically to a friend in Salamanca, ‘and more in love than words can say’. Certainly Philip was unfailingly polite and considerate, riding at Mary’s side, always at hand to help her mount and dismount, attentive, said someone else with perhaps unconscious cruelty, as a son. By 11 August they were at Richmond and a week later the Queen brought her husband to the capital. London had been swept and garnished, the gibbets and blackened heads removed and decorations more suitable to the occasion substituted. The citizens, well primed with free drink, were in a benevolent mood and although there was plenty of jealousy and backbiting at Court and the Spaniards complained they were being charged twenty-five times the proper price for everything in the shops, on the surface things were going reasonably well.
Philip was determined that they should continue to do so. The whole point of his marriage (and the only reason why he was enduring it) was to enable him to gain control of the government, to bring England permanently within the Imperial Hapsburg orbit, and to achieve this it was essential to avoid serious friction. Mary, lost in her fool’s paradise of love, was only too happy to leave everything in his hands; to trust prudent, pious, Catholic Philip to be wise for both of them.
While Mary was giving herself up to the delights of married life, Elizabeth was still languishing at Woodstock. The Queen had given orders that her sister was to be treated ‘in such good and honourable sort as may be agreeable to our honour and her estate and degree’, and Elizabeth had a respectable number of servants to wait on her, was allowed to walk in the gardens and orchard and to have any books, within reason, to help pass the time. But time passed with agonizing slowness and the princess, who was becoming increasingly bored and resentful, did not hesitate to tease her custodian with demands for all sorts of additional concessions and to complain that she was being worse treated than any prisoner in the Tower or, on second thoughts, worse than the worst prisoner in Newgate. The unhappy Henry Bedingfield, acutely conscious of his heavy responsibilities and never quite sure if ‘this great lady’, as he always described Elizabeth, was in earnest or not, found himself in a constant state of marvellous perplexity ‘whether to grant her desires or to say her nay’. Like a good civil servant, he took refuge in tenacious adherence to his instructions and insisted on referring every detail to London, although, as he apologetically admitted, he realized this meant that he was having to trouble the Council ‘with more letters than be contentful to mine own opinion’.
This was precisely what Elizabeth intended he should do, for while she undoubtedly got a certain amount of amusement out of baiting Bedingfield, she had another and more serious purpose. The public memory was short and buried in the country she could all too easily be forgotten. Her enemies might then seize the opportunity to have her shipped abroad – the Emperor had a scheme to send her to his sister in Brussels – and once there she might be married off to some obscure Hapsburg dependant or perhaps even more permanently disposed of. So she nagged persistently to have her case re-opened and in June had got permission to write to the Queen. But Mary had not deigned to reply, merely sending Bedingfield a curt message that she did not want to be bothered with any more of her sister’s ‘disguised and colourable’ letters. A month later, though, she did agree to allow Elizabeth to ‘write her mind’ to the Council and the princess begged their lordships ‘upon very pity, considering her long imprisonment and restraint of liberty’, to persuade the Queen either to have her charged ‘with special matter to be answered unto and tried, or to grant her liberty to come unto her highness’s presence, which … she would not desire were it not that she knoweth herself to be clear even before God, for her allegiance.’ Elizabeth addressed her appeal specifically to those members of the Council who had been executors ‘of the Will of the King’s majesty her father’ – a shrewd reminder that, outcast and disgraced though she might be, she was still heir presumptive to the throne.
Elizabeth may have hoped that now Mary was married and had presumably got everything she wanted, she would be in a more amenable frame of mind. But Mary made no sign and the Council remained deaf to Elizabeth’s complaints. The Queen, it appeared, was determined to wring some admission of guilt or contrition out of her sister before she would consider setting her free. The winter closed in and the household at Woodstock gloomily resigned itself to waiting for an indefinite contest of Tudor stubbornness.
In London that winter events were taking place which, temporarily at least, had pushed the problem of Elizabeth’s fate into the background. Mary believed herself to be pregnant, and on 12 November she and Philip together opened the third Parliament of the reign – a Parliament which, if all went well, would re-establish Rome’s authority over the church in England. Two weeks later Cardinal Pole, the first papal legate to set foot on English soil since the far-off days of the King’s Great Matter, travelled up-river to Westminster bringing with him the Pope’s absolution for his schismatic and excommunicated countrymen. Reginald Pole, an exile for more than twenty years, was the son of Margaret Plantagenet, the butchered Countess of Salisbury, and for Mary Tudor he brought back precious memories of happy childhood days as well as being the living symbol of so many of her future hopes. As she stood waiting to greet this long-lost kinsman and prince of the Church, the Queen felt a joyous conviction that ‘the babe had quickened and leapt in her womb’.
A few days later the reconciliation with Rome had been accomplished. The three estates of the realm knelt together in the Great Chamber of the Court at Westminster to receive the absolution pronounced by the Bishop of Winchester and England was once again a Roman Catholic country. The negotiations leading up to this remarkable moment had been going on throughout the autumn under the personal supervision of Philip of Spain and had been primarily concerned with devising unbreakable safeguards for the property rights of all holders of church lands. Once these had been hammered out to everyone’s satisfaction, the Commons, a body carefully chosen from ‘the wise, grave and Catholic sort’, was ready to complete the work of undoing the Reformation, of repealing all the religious and ecclesiastical legislation passed during the last two reigns, of abrogating the Royal Supremacy and restoring the ancient laws and penalties against heresy.
So far, it seemed, so good. But as the expected date of Mary’s delivery approached, the question of the future in general and of Elizabeth’s future in particular was once more exercising men’s minds. Stephen Gardiner was openly of the opinion that all attempts to eradicate Protestantism in England would amount to no more than stripping the leaves and lopping the branches as long as the root of the evil – the heretical heiress herself – remained untouched. Now if ever was the time, urged the Lord Chancellor, to push a bill through Parliament disinheriting her once and for all. But there was strangely little enthusiasm for this project. Even the Spaniards were lukewarm, reflecting that if Elizabeth was passed over, it would be very difficult to resist the claims of the Catholic but half-French Mary Stuart.
Philip, in consultation with Simon Renard, was now giving the problem his serious attention. He was assured of the regency if Mary died in childbed and her child survived. But supposing, as seemed probable enough, neither mother nor child survived? Suppose, even, as was being whispered in some quarters, Mary was not pregnant at all? Philip was a tidy-minded man and he wanted to see the whole matter of the English succession put on a regular basis. Elizabeth would have to be released sooner or later and, according to Bedingfield’s reports, she was conducting herself like a good Catholic these days. It would, therefore, surely be more sensible to try and establish friendly relations with her now, at a time when she was likely to be grateful for her brother-in-law’s support and was still young enough to be influenced. A Catholic husband could then be found for her – that useful Hapsburg pensioner Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Piedmont, would do as well as any, or there might be a suitable German prince available – and the future of the alliance would be secured. Philip’s reasoning was politically sound but he may also have been motivated by purely human curiosity in his evident desire to make the acquaintance of this enigmatic, dangerous young woman he had heard so much about.
At the beginning of April 1555, the Queen moved to Hampton Court to ‘take her chamber’ in preparation for her lying-in and towards the end of the month Bedingfield received a summons to bring his charge to the palace. The journey from Woodstock was made in typical blustery spring weather and the party encountered violent squalls and gusts of wind which got under the ladies’ skirts and blew the princess’s hood from her head. She wanted to take shelter in a nearby gentleman’s house but Bedingfield, inflexible to the end, refused to allow even this slight deviation from the itinerary, and Elizabeth had to do up her hair under a hedge as best she could.
She was brought to Hampton Court by a back entrance, still under close guard. According to a French source, Philip came to see her privately three days later, but it was nearly a fortnight before any official notice was taken of her arrival. Then she received a visit from a deputation headed by the Lord Chancellor himself, who urged her to submit herself to the Queen. If she did so, he had no doubt that her Majesty would be disposed to be merciful. Elizabeth answered sharply that she wanted justice not mercy. She was not going to ask pardon for crimes she had not committed. Besides, if once she yielded and confessed herself to be an offender, the Queen would never trust her again. It would be better for her to lie in prison for the truth, than to be abroad and suspected of her prince.
There was silence for another week and then, suddenly, at ten o’clock one night, a summons came for Elizabeth to go at once to the Queen. She had been agitating for a personal interview for more than a year, but now the moment had come and as she was walking with her escort through the darkness she must have wondered what the outcome would be. At the foot of the staircase leading to the Queen’s lodging, the little procession halted. Bedingfield waited outside while Elizabeth, accompanied by one of the Queen’s ladies and one of her own, went up to her sister’s bedroom. Without giving Mary a chance to speak, she fell on her knees and once again proclaimed her innocence. ‘You will not confess your offence’, said Mary out of the shadows, ‘but stand stoutly to your truth. I pray God it may so fall out.’ ‘If it doth not’, answered Elizabeth, ‘I request neither favour nor pardon at your Majesty’s hands.’ ‘Well’, came the somewhat ungracious response, ‘you stiffly still persevere in your truth. Belike you will not confess but that you have been wrongfully punished.’ ‘I must not say so, if it please your Majesty, to you.’ ‘Why then’, persisted the Queen, ‘belike you will to others.’ ‘No’, said Elizabeth, ‘no, if it please your Majesty, I have borne the burden and must bear it. I humbly beseech your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me to be your true subject, not only from the beginning, but for ever, as long as life lasteth.’
As she stared at the supple figure of her sister, kneeling before her in the candlelight, Mary knew that she had lost the battle of wills. She must accept, however reluctantly, Elizabeth’s assurances of loyalty and make her peace with Anne Boleyn’s daughter.
Elizabeth was now relieved of Sir Henry Bedingfield and his departure marked the end of a period of detention which had lasted just over fifteen months. She remained at Court and, although not yet fully restored to favour, had regained a limited freedom of action. A freedom which she wisely used with caution for Elizabeth, like everyone else that summer, was in a state of suspended animation while the uncertainty surrounding the Queen’s impending confinement hung like a fog blotting out the future. If, against all the odds, Mary did succeed in bearing a healthy child – and Mary had already once succeeded against all the odds – then the political scene would be transformed, perhaps for generations to come. As Simon Renard observed, ‘everything in this kingdom depends on the Queen’s safe deliverance’.
By mid-April all was ready. The palace was crowded with noble ladies summoned to assist at the Queen’s delivery. Midwives, nurses and rockers were in attendance, and the empty cradle waited. Here, nearly eighteen years before, Edward Tudor had been born. Was another Tudor prince about to draw his first breath in Cardinal Wolsey’s fine red-brick mansion? Everything possible was being done to encourage the Queen. The Venetian ambassador reported on 2 April that to comfort her and give her heart and courage ‘three most beautiful infants were brought for her Majesty to see; they having been born a few days previously at one birth, of a woman of low stature and great age like the Queen, who after delivery found herself strong and out of danger.’
At daybreak on 30 April a rumour reached London that Mary had given birth to a son just after midnight ‘with little pain and no danger’. So circumstantial was this report that it was generally believed and bonfires were lit, church bells rung and ‘in divers places Te Deum Laudamus was sung’, while loyal citizens set up trestles before their doors and began dispensing free food and drink to their neighbours. It was late afternoon before the messengers returning from Hampton Court brought the dispiriting news that there was no son or daughter either and that the birth was not even imminent. As the days of waiting lengthened into weeks, the doctors announced that their calculations had been wrong, that the Queen would not now be delivered until the end of May, possibly not until the first week of June, although her Majesty’s belly had greatly declined, a sign, it was said, of the nearer approach of the term.
June turned into July and the doctors and midwives were still talking about miscalculation, still promising the wretched Queen that she was carrying a child, but saying the birth might be delayed until August or even September. By this time, though, everyone knew that no baby would ever fill that ‘very sumptuously and gorgeously trimmed’ cradle. The amenorrhoea and digestive troubles to which Mary had always been subject, perhaps, too, cancer of the womb, had combined with her desperate longing which – according to the omniscient diplomatic corps – even produced ‘swelling of the paps and their emission of milk’ to create that tragic, long-drawn-out self-deception.
By the end of July the situation at Hampton Court was becoming too embarrassing to be allowed to continue any longer. Something had to be done to silence the ribald ale-house gossip and all those inevitable rumours about humble mothers being begged to give up their new-born babies to emissaries from the palace. The daily processions and prayers for the Queen’s delivery were stopped and on 3 August the Court moved away to Oatlands in a tacit admission that Mary had at last given up hope. But as she struggled to come to terms with her bitter disappointment and humiliation, she had another sorrow to face – for the adored husband, on whom she had lavished all the love so long denied an outlet, was planning to leave her. Philip had now spent thirteen months in a country he disliked, being affable to people he despised and distrusted, being kind to a demanding, physically unattractive and unfruitful wife. He considered he had done everything that could reasonably be expected of him.
He was to embark at Dover as soon as the escorting fleet could be made ready and on 26 August the Court moved down to Greenwich to see him off. Three days later he was gone, after punctiliously kissing all the ladies, just as he had done that first evening in Winchester, and Mary stood in tears at a window overlooking the river watching until the barge taking him away to Gravesend had passed out of her sight. It was the end of her brief happiness.
The Queen planned to stay at Greenwich during Philip’s absence and Reginald Pole was given apartments in the palace, so that he might ‘comfort and keep her company, her Majesty delighting greatly in the sight and presence of him’. Elizabeth was also at Greenwich, though it is doubtful if her presence gave Mary any particular pleasure. However, Elizabeth was now in a privileged position. She had used those weeks of waiting at Hampton Court to good purpose and, at least according to the Venetian ambassador, had ‘contrived so to ingratiate herself with all the Spaniards and especially the King, that ever since no one has favoured her more than he does.’ Years later a report circulated that Philip had been heard to admit that whatever he suffered from Queen Elizabeth was no more than the just judgement of God, because ‘being married to Queen Mary, whom he thought a most virtuous and good lady, yet in the fancy of love he could not affect her; but as for the Lady Elizabeth, he was enamoured of her, being a fair and beautiful woman.’ Whether Philip was really smitten by his sister-in-law’s charms remains a matter for conjecture but he had clearly made up his mind that notwithstanding her dubious birth and heretical tendencies, she would make an infinitely preferable successor to the English throne than Mary Queen of Scots. Before he left England, therefore, he had particularly commended Elizabeth to Mary’s good will and (this time according to the French ambassador) was soon writing from the Low Countries to repeat what was virtually an order to the Queen to handle her sister with courtesy and care. Since Philip’s lightest wish was Mary’s command, she obediently choked down her instinctive antipathy, treating the princess graciously in public and only conversing with her about ‘agreeable subjects’.
September turned into October with no sign of Philip’s return and Mary was obliged to abandon her vigil and go back to London for the opening of Parliament. Elizabeth did not accompany her. She had been given permission to leave the Court and on 18 October she passed through the City on her way to Hatfield. Settled once more in her favourite residence after an absence of over two years, she began to take up the threads of her old life and to gather her old friends round her again. Things, in fact, were looking up for Elizabeth. She had made a powerful ally in Philip. Simon Renard had been recalled to Brussels and was no longer dropping poison into Mary’s ear, and in November another old enemy disappeared with the death of Stephen Gardiner. The princess knew that time was now on her side. She had only to wait – and she was good at waiting – steer clear of politics and, above all, avoid any matrimonial entanglements, and sooner or later the prize would fall into her lap.