The trivial prophecy which I heard when I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years, was,
‘When hempe is sponne
England’s done’
whereby it was generally conceived, that after the princes had reigned which had the principal letters of that word hempe (which were Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip, and Elizabeth), England should come to utter confusion; which, thanks be to God, is verified only in the change of name; for that the king’s style is now no more of England but of Britain.
FRANCIS BACON
By 1568, after ten years on the English throne, Elizabeth Tudor had matured into a vigorous, elegant, self-confident woman in her mid-thirties who, by intelligent statecraft and good housekeeping, had lifted her country out of its mid-century doldrums and won the respect, if not always the approval, of her fellow monarchs. Any misgivings which her subjects may once have felt about embarking on another experience of petticoat government had long since vanished and the love affair between Queen and people – foundation and cornerstone of the whole astonishing Elizabethan epic – was already a vital part of the national ethos. As a relationship it is something unique in history and, like most love affairs, defies too close an analysis. Probably it was best and most succinctly described in two verses of the popular ballad – A Song Between the Queen’s Majestie and Englande – first printed in 1571, but written quite early in the reign.
Hath chosen thee to mine heir;
And my name is merry Englande;
Therefore, come away,
And make no more delay,
Sweet Bessie! give me thy hand.
Here is my hand,
My dear lover Englande,
I am thine both with mind and heart,
For ever to endure,
Thou mayest be sure,
Until death us two do part.
‘Until death us two do part’ … The fear that Elizabeth might die with the succession still unsettled haunted all politically conscious Englishmen, who were only too well aware that their present peace and prosperity depended, quite literally, on the slender thread of the Queen’s life. The terrifying ease with which that thread might be cut was demonstrated in the autumn of 1562, when Elizabeth caught a virulent strain of smallpox and did very nearly die. Not surprisingly, this scare led to a renewed onslaught on the Queen to name her successor and to get married. When Parliament met in January 1563, the Speaker of the Commons wasted no time in presenting a petition referring to ‘the great terror and dreadful warning’ of the Queen’s illness. He went on to paint a gloomy picture of the ‘unspeakable miseries’ of civil war, foreign interference, bloodshed and destruction of lives, property and liberty which lay in wait for the country if she were to die without a known heir. A few days later, the House of Lords presented another, similar petition which begged the Queen to dispose herself to marry ‘where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’.
The Queen received these impassioned pleas graciously enough, but she would not be stampeded into action she might later regret. She knew she was mortal, she told the Commons, and asked them to believe that she, who had always been so careful of her subjects’ welfare in other matters, would not be careless in this, which concerned them all so nearly. But, because it was a matter of such importance, she would not make any hasty answer. In fact, she would defer making any answer at all until she had been able to consider it further. ‘And so I assure you all’, she ended, ‘that, though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all.’
Elizabeth succeeded in stalling Parliament – although there were some rebellious mutterings in the Commons about withholding subsidies if she continued to be obstinate – but the problem refused to go away. It was, after all, the same problem which had overshadowed English political life ever since the death of Prince Arthur in 1502. Elizabeth was fully alive to the dangers of the situation. On the other hand, she was even more acutely aware of the danger of having a named heir. She knew, none better, that the heir inevitably became the focal point for discontent of every kind and was utterly determined never to risk being ‘buried alive’ like her sister.
As far as marriage, with its necessarily uncertain corollary of childbearing, was concerned, the Queen, quite apart from her personal inclinations and her reluctance to lose her most valuable card in the game of international diplomacy, could see the practical difficulties involved far more clearly than her faithful Lords and Commons. Since the death of Edward Courtenay, there was no available Englishman of sufficiently high rank to make him acceptable to his fellows and if Elizabeth were to marry a subject, she would arouse violent jealousies and animosities – the uproar over Robert Dudley had already proved that. If she chose a foreigner, the problems would have been as great, if not greater. Nationalistic feeling would once again have run high and, to make matters worse, pretty well every eligible European prince was a Roman Catholic. The consort of a sixteenth-century queen regnant could not remain a cipher; he would have expected, and been expected, to take an active part in the government. But to attempt to introduce a Catholic king into an increasingly fervent Protestant country would have been asking for the most alarming variety of trouble.
Elizabeth’s instinct was to do nothing and go on gambling on her own survival. ‘So long as I live’, she once remarked, ‘I shall be Queen of England. When I am dead, they shall succeed that have most right.’ But she was a reasonable woman. She could understand and sympathize with her subjects’ natural anxiety about their own and their children’s future, and during the early sixties she did cautiously explore the possibility of finding a way out of the impasse. It was, however, perfectly plain that, her father’s will and the Protestant preferences of her people regardless, Elizabeth never for one moment contemplated recognizing the claims of English and Protestant Katherine Grey. If a solution acceptable to the Queen of England were to be found, it would have to involve the Queen of Scotland.
During the first decade of her cousin’s reign, the fortunes of Mary Stuart had fluctuated wildly. In 1558 she had apparently stood on the threshold of a career of unexampled brilliance. In the summer of 1559 the freakish death of her father-in-law, Henri II, in a tiltyard accident had brought her to the throne of France beside her youthful husband – a Queen twice over at the age of sixteen-and-a-half. Then, in December 1560 the sickly François II was also dead and Mary had become a widow three days before her eighteenth birthday. ‘The thoughts of widowhood at so early an age’, commented a sympathetic Venetian, Michel Surian, ‘and of the loss of a consort who was so great a King and who so dearly loved her … so afflict her that she will not receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant tears and passionate and doleful lamentations, she universally inspires great pity.’
All the same, Mary soon began to cheer up and take stock of her altered situation. Her ten-year-old brother-in-law was now King of France and power had passed into the hands of the Queen Mother, that formidable matriarch Catherine de Medici, who was making no particular secret of the fact that she would prefer the Queen of Scots’ room to her company. Mary Stuart had been brought up to regard her Scottish kingdom as a mere appanage of France but now, in the spring of 1561, Scotland appeared in a rather different light. To a full-blooded, optimistic teenager with little taste for taking a back seat, it offered a challenge and a promise of adventure with, perhaps, more glittering triumphs to come. The question was, would Scotland have her back, for there, too, things had changed.
Two years before, the Protestant nobility, banded together under the title of the Lords of the Congregation and assisted, albeit somewhat reluctantly, by the Queen of England, had risen in revolt against the Catholic and alien government of Mary’s mother, the Queen Regent Mary of Guise. In June 1560 the Regent died and French influence in Scotland reached its lowest ebb for a generation. William Cecil had hurried up to Edinburgh to attend the peace talks and during the course of a fortnight’s hard bargaining succeeded in extracting a number of important concessions from the French commissioners acting on behalf of the young Queen and her husband. The religious question was tactfully left in abeyance but when the Scots Parliament met in August, they at once proceeded of their own authority to adopt the Calvinistic form of Protestantism as their national religion. In the circumstances, therefore, it was scarcely surprising that the Lords of the Congregation should have been less than enthusiastic over the projected return of their Catholic sovereign.
Mary, as Queen of France, had refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh and in the autumn of 1560 had expressed strong disapproval of the proceedings in the Scottish Parliament. ‘My subjects of Scotland do their duty in nothing, nor have they performed one point that belongeth to them’, she told Nicholas Throckmorton. ‘I am their sovereign, but they take me not so. They must be taught to know their duties.’ By the spring of 1561 she was no longer in a position to take such a high tone and instead set herself out to charm the English and Scottish envoys who came to France to look her over. She repeatedly declared her earnest desire to live in peace and friendship with Elizabeth, ‘her good sister and tender cousin’, and also declared her willingness to accept the new status quo in Scotland. Not, of course, that she could have done otherwise but she did it gracefully, insisting only that she must be given the right to practise her own religion in private, and as it dawned on the Protestant lords that their Queen’s dynastic potentialities would now work in favour of Scotland rather than France, they began to take a more optimistic view of the future.
Young Mary Stuart was, in fact, winning golden opinions all round and Nicholas Throckmorton’s dispatches were full of her virtue and discretion, her good judgement, her modesty and her readiness to be ruled by good counsel. It may not have been very tactful to praise one Queen to another in quite such glowing terms, but Throckmorton had not yet forgiven his mistress for the acute embarrassment she had caused him over the Dudley affair. Elizabeth, for her part, was clearly disconcerted by the seductive qualities being exhibited by her eighteen-year-old cousin. If Mary could so captivate Nicholas Throckmorton, a hard-headed diplomat and a strict Protestant, who could tell what havoc the pretty creature might create among the excitable and boisterous Scottish warlords? Who could tell how many simple men might be ‘carried away with vain hope, and brought abed with fair words’?
As it turned out Mary Stuart’s first three years in her northern kingdom were by no means unsuccessful. Her subjects, with the exception of that archetypal male chauvinist John Knox, were ready to be pleased with her and Mary, although never approaching the political acumen of Elizabeth Tudor, had had the sense to make friends with her bastard half-brother, the influential James Stuart, Earl of Moray. With Moray’s efficient and tough-minded support, she was able to manage reasonably well at home. Abroad, all her efforts were directed towards ingratiating herself with the Queen of England and persuading Elizabeth to recognize her as heir presumptive to the English throne.
Elizabeth seemed prepared to be friendly. She was even ready to admit, in private conversation with the Scottish envoy William Maitland of Lethington, that she personally considered Mary to be her natural and lawful successor; but further than that she would not go. She would not make her good sister and cousin her heir ‘by order of Parliament’, which was what Mary was after. Unless … and there was just one possible solution. The widowed Queen of Scotland was very nearly as eligible a match as the spinster Queen of England. Everything would depend on the identity of Mary’s second husband and it was during the spring of 1563, when Elizabeth was desperately looking for some way of relieving the almost intolerable pressure being exerted on her to settle the succession, that she first proposed Robert Dudley as a bridegroom for Mary Stuart. On the face of it, it seemed such an eccentric suggestion that William Maitland thought the Queen must be joking. But no, she was apparently quite serious. That autumn, Thomas Randolph, the English agent in Edinburgh, was instructed to drop broad hints on the subject to Mary herself and finally, in the spring of 1564, Elizabeth authorized Randolph to make the matter official.
Mary’s public reaction was non-committal. Privately she regarded the whole idea with the utmost scepticism. If, as was implicit, Elizabeth really meant to recognize her right to the reversion of the English crown in return for accepting Elizabeth’s choice of husband, the Queen of Scots might have swallowed her understandable umbrage over the choice of the notorious Lord Robert. But she could not rid herself of the suspicion that she was being hoaxed; that by offering her cousin her own discarded lover, Elizabeth was planning to turn her into a laughing-stock and perhaps prevent her from making some more advantageous marriage. Mary was not alone in her opinion and many people since have found it hard to credit that Elizabeth could ever have genuinely intended to part with her favourite – and not merely part with him but give him up to a younger, prettier woman and her most dangerous rival. But in the last resort, what mattered to Elizabeth Tudor was the peace and security of her realm. If she had felt satisfied that her peculiar plan would have achieved this end, there seems little reason to doubt that she would have gone through with it.
Perhaps the most curious feature of the whole curious incident is the apparently unlimited degree of trust that the Queen was prepared to repose in Robert Dudley. She told James Melville that she would have married Lord Robert herself, had she ever been minded to take a husband. But being determined to end her life a maid, she wanted Mary to have him. For this, she explained, ‘would best remove out of her heart all fear and suspicion to be offended by usurpation before her death; being assured that he was so loving and trusty that he would never give his consent nor suffer such thing to be attempted during her time.’
Melville spent about ten days in London as Mary’s special envoy during September 1564 and saw Elizabeth every day. She displayed an insatiable curiosity about the cousin she had never seen and wished repeatedly that they might meet. When Melville jokingly offered to smuggle her into Scotland disguised as a page, so that she might see his Queen, Elizabeth smiled and said, ‘Alas! that I might do it.’ But she told him she wanted a closer friendship with Mary in the future and that ‘she was minded to put away all jealousies and suspicions between them.’ Unhappily, though, the Queen of Scots found herself unable to conquer her aversion to the idea of marriage to the horse-keeper, in spite of the fact that he had now at last been elevated to the dignity of Earl of Leicester. In any case, by the following spring, her actions had ceased to be governed by policy, for Mary had fallen head over heels in love with another of her cousins, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, now a graceful ‘lady-faced’ youth of nineteen, and was no longer willing ‘to be ruled by good counsel’. She quarrelled fatally with Moray and the Protestant party and had apparently ceased to care if she offended Queen Elizabeth. Her old admirer, Nicholas Throckmorton, was shocked at the change in her and William Cecil, as usual, feared the worst.
Mary and Darnley were married in July 1565 and from then on the home life of the Queen of Scotland became different indeed from that of most well-regulated royal households. Darnley soon revealed himself to be a bully and a drunkard – weak, cowardly and vicious – and an easy dupe in the hands of the jealous, ruthless, power-hungry men pressing round the Scottish throne. Darnley was of the party which burst into that little supper room at Holyrood in March 1566 and forced the Queen – she was six months pregnant – to witness the brutal murder of her Italian secretary. Darnley had been in the plot to seize and imprison the Queen, instal himself as a puppet king and bring back the exiled Earl of Moray. Mary survived the ordeal, outwitting her enemies and regaining her freedom of action in a brilliant display of courage and resourcefulness, but she did not forgive her husband.
In spite of everything, her baby was born safely that June and James Melville came south again to bring the news to London and ask the Queen of England to stand godmother to the infant Prince James. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, the arrival of Mary’s son was the best thing to have come out of the whole messy business. For if the child survived (and that was a biggish ‘if’, given the current state of affairs in Scotland), who better than this double great-great-grandson of the first Henry Tudor to succeed to the Tudor throne? But that was for the future. In the meantime, what was to be done about the baby’s parents?
It was now an open secret that Mary was urgently looking for a way to get rid of Darnley. ‘It is heartbreaking for her to think he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no outgait’, wrote William Maitland on 24 October. But it was obvious that some ‘outgait’ would be found and no one was unbearably surprised when the miserable Darnley met his Grand Guignol end at the house of Kirk o’Field in January 1567. His widow’s subsequent career, culminating four months later in marriage to the uncouth and charmless Earl of Bothwell, was, however, followed with horrified astonishment by the outside world.
In London, Darnley’s mother was crying out for vengeance on her murdered son, and Margaret Lennox, who had been in the Tower and Queen Elizabeth’s black books for having allegedly schemed to bring about the Scottish match in the first place, was let out of gaol by her sympathetic sovereign. In Edinburgh, increasingly outspoken placards were appearing on the streets, naming Bothwell as the King’s murderer and accusing the Queen of having been his accomplice. Elizabeth, with her own experience after the death of Amy Robsart still fresh in her mind, wrote vehemently to Mary: ‘I should not do the office of a faithful cousin and friend, if I did not urge you to preserve your honour, rather than look through your fingers at revenge on those who have done you “such pleasure” as most people say.’ And from Mary’s friends abroad came anxious appeals to bring her husband’s murderers to justice and clear her own name.
But Mary, having apparently cast all considerations of prudence and even elementary commonsense to the winds, paid no attention to the repeated warnings and remonstrances of her well-wishers. Instead of taking steps to bring Bothwell to justice, she continued to show every sign of pleasure in his company and by May she had married him, a divorced man, according to the rites of the Protestant church. It has been suggested that she was suffering from a complete mental breakdown and that she may have been a victim of porphyria, the mysterious hereditary ailment which afflicted her descendant George III. Certainly this is the most charitable explanation, but her contemporaries could only suppose that the Queen of Scotland had allowed her illicit passion to run away with her. Whatever the real reasons behind Mary’s self-destructive rampage during the first half of 1567, nemesis was not long in catching up with her. If her second marriage had been a tragic mistake, her third was an unmitigated disaster. By June Bothwell had fled for his life and Mary was a prisoner in the hands of her outraged nobility. By July she had been forced to abdicate in favour of her year-old son.
Elizabeth Tudor may not have felt much personal sympathy for the cousin who was making such a spectacular hash of her life, but she held strong views about subjects who, whatever the provocation, insulted, threatened and imprisoned an anointed Queen. She fired volleys of explosive warnings into Scotland about what would happen if the lords took any further action against Mary, and she sent Nicholas Throckmorton north to make the situation crystal clear to the new Scottish government. William Cecil and Throckmorton himself were strongly opposed to this policy. They, and the majority of the Privy Council, were eager to support the Scots lords and terrified that Elizabeth’s violent hostility would have the effect of driving Scotland once again into the arms of France. But the Queen was not to be deflected and gave Cecil several anxious moments. He told Throckmorton early in August that she had sent for him in great haste and made him ‘a great offensive speech that nothing was thought of for her to do to revenge the Queen of Scots’ imprisonment and deliver her.’ ‘I answered her as warily as I could’, wrote Cecil, ‘but she increased so in anger against these lords that in good earnest she began to devise revenge by war.’
Although Mary remained in prison and Elizabeth did not fulfil her threats to go to war on her behalf, there can be no doubt that the Queen of England’s intervention had saved the Queen of Scots’ life. Then, less than a year later, the inevitable happened. Mary, resourceful, brave and optimistic as ever, escaped from Lochleven Castle. On 13 May she and her supporters were routed at the battle of Langside and three days later, on 16 May 1568, she landed on the coast of Cumberland, a refugee with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. ‘I fear’, wrote Archbishop Parker prophetically, ‘that our good Queen hath the wolf by the ears.’
According to the French and Spanish ambassadors, Elizabeth’s first, generous impulse was to send for Mary and welcome her as an honoured guest, but the Council quickly overruled their mistress’s instinctive desire to show solidarity with her sister Queen. ‘Although these people are glad enough to have her in their hands’, wrote the Spanish ambassador, ‘they have many things to consider. If they keep her as in prison, it will probably scandalize all neighbouring princes, and if she remain free and able to communicate with her friends, great suspicions will be aroused. In any case’, added Guzman de Silva with studied understatement, ‘it is certain that two women will not agree very long.’
The English Council, painfully aware of the many things they had to consider, at once ‘entered into serious deliberation’ as to what should be done with the Queen of Scots. ‘If she were detained in England’, says William Camden, ‘they reasoned lest she (who was as it were the very pith and marrow of sweet eloquence) might draw many daily to her part which favoured her title to the crown of England, who would kindle the coals of her ambition and leave nothing unassayed whereby they might set the crown upon her head.’ If she were allowed to return to France, her powerful kinsmen there would inevitably stir up a hornets’ nest of faction in both Scotland and England. For Elizabeth to attempt to restore the Queen of Scots to her throne by force would be to invite civil war in Scotland, a rupture of the precious and still none too secure ‘amity’ with that country, and an almost certain revival in some form of the old Franco-Scottish alliance which had been the cause of so much trouble and bloodshed in the past. On the other hand, it had to be remembered that Mary was one of Elizabeth’s closest relatives and that she had sought refuge in England trusting in her cousin’s promises of protection and support. To hand her back to men who would not hesitate to kill her, was equally unthinkable.
At first sight the problem looked insoluble – especially as Mary’s attitude made it plain that she was unlikely to agree to any sort of compromise. Elizabeth’s old and trusted friend, Francis Knollys, who had been sent up to take charge of the situation at Carlisle, where the Queen of Scots was now holding court, found her full of an articulate sense of grievance. ‘She showeth a great desire to be avenged of her enemies’, he wrote on 11 June. ‘The thing that most she thirsteth after is victory, and it seemeth to be indifferent to her to have her enemies diminished either by the sword of her friends, or by the liberal promises and rewards of her purse, or by division and quarrels raised among themselves: so that for victory’s sake pain and peril seemeth pleasant to her: and in respect of victory, wealth and all things seemeth to her contemptible and vile. Now what is to be done with such a lady and princess?’ enquired Francis Knollys, with a certain rhetorical flourish, of his friend William Cecil.
What indeed? Mary was told that Elizabeth could not receive her while she remained under suspicion of having been an accessory before the fact of Darnley’s murder. Mary demanded to be allowed to justify herself before Elizabeth in person, and Elizabeth wrote: ‘O Madam, there is no creature living who wishes to hear such a declaration more than I, or will more readily lend her ears to any answer that will acquit your honour.’ The Queen of England offered to mediate in the dispute between the Queen of Scots and her rebellious subjects, but since neither side would budge an inch from their previously entrenched positions the enquiry, held at York and Westminster, got nowhere. In the end, the Earl of Moray went back to Scotland as regent for the infant King James and Mary stayed in England. She was placed in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury and was to spend the next sixteen years in one or other of that much-tried nobleman’s mansions in the North Midlands. It was, of course, a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation – expensive and embarrassing for the Queen of England, frustrating and humiliating for the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth continued with patient pertinacity to try and find some formula by which Mary could be restored peacefully to her own throne, but negotiations always foundered on the ineradicable distrust between the cousins, on the impossibility of devising adequate safeguards against Mary’s subsequent repudiation of any undertakings given under duress.
For England the consequences of nourishing that ‘bosom serpent’, the de facto Catholic heir presumptive, soon became only too apparent, as Mary’s restless energy found its outlet in an endless series of dangerous and futile intrigues. ‘Alas, poor fool!’ exclaimed the King of France, ‘she will never cease until they cut off her head.’ By the mid-1580s the revelations of the Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot (Francis not Nicholas), the Parry Plot and the Babington Plot, together with an ever-darkening international scene and the increasing bitterness of the ideological conflict between Catholic and Protestant had all combined to bring the problem of the Queen of Scots to a festering head. As Francis Walsingham had put it, more than ten years earlier – ‘So long as that devilish woman lives, neither her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives.’
By 1586, Mary’s guilt or innocence of complicity in the various Catholic conspiracies to depose the heretical Queen of England no longer had any real relevance. Guilty or innocent, the Protestant state, feeling itself threatened from within and without, could no longer contain her. It was as simple as that. Elizabeth had fought desperately to postpone the inevitable decision and when at last it had to be made, it caused her real and acute distress. Her extreme, apparently perverse reluctance to authorize the execution of her deadliest enemy – even after she had been presented with enough evidence to convince any reasonable person that Mary was not only prepared to seize her throne but to connive at her own assassination – is, on the face of it, difficult to understand. So difficult, in fact, that it has often been dismissed as mere play-acting. Perhaps there was some play-acting. Elizabeth always was a consummate actress, ‘a princess who can act any part she pleases’, and, of course, she knew she would be presenting the Catholic world with a first-rate propaganda weapon. ‘What will they not now say’, she exclaimed, ‘when it shall be spread that for the safety of her life a maiden Queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman!’
Elizabeth had always suffered from a most un-Tudor-like squeamishness when it came to spilling the blood of her kinsfolk, but she told Parliament in November 1586: ‘I am not so void of judgement as not to see mine own peril, nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat.’ And yet, if she could have found a way of keeping Mary alive, even at that eleventh hour, she would undoubtedly have done so. If it had not been for Elizabeth, Mary would almost certainly have died at the hands of her own subjects in 1567. If it had not been for Elizabeth, she would quite certainly have gone to the scaffold with the Duke of Norfolk in 1572. So why was the Queen of England, that most practical of rulers, so anxious to preserve the woman she had herself recently described as a ‘wicked murderess’?
There were sound practical reasons. For although Mary had come to represent such an intolerable threat to England’s internal security, she also, ironically enough, remained England’s best protection against attack from abroad. While she lived, Philip of Spain was likely to go on hesitating before launching his much-heralded Sacred Enterprise against the Protestant island and its anathematized Queen. The success of the Enterprise might well store up treasure in heaven for the King of Spain, but he would still be lavishing earthly treasure (always in painfully short supply) on elevating the half-French Mary Stuart to the English throne – and that elevation would sooner or later inevitably result in the close Anglo-French alliance which for generations the Hapsburgs had laboured to prevent. Once Mary was dead, the situation would look different to a King who could, after all, prove his own remote descent from John of Gaunt.
But more than the political considerations, more than her inherent dread of committing herself to any irreversible course of action, more than natural compassion for her close kinswoman and sister Queen, that aspect of Mary’s end which upset Elizabeth most and which surely lay beneath her violent, hysterical reaction after the deed had been done, was the superstitious revulsion of one who has violated a sacred mystery. To one of Elizabeth’s heredity and upbringing, there was something unspeakably atrocious in the act of subjecting God’s anointed to the process of earthly trial and judicial execution. It was the ultimate taboo. It was also setting a grimly dangerous precedent.
Once Mary had gone, the problem of the English succession finally lost its urgency. The Suffolk line had withered away. Margaret Lennox was dead and so was her younger son, Charles; although he had left a daughter, Arbella, the last of those forlorn female descendants of Henry VII whose fate, in the next century, was closely to mirror that of the unfortunate Katherine Grey. Mary Stuart’s son, James, was a man of twenty when his mother died and while Elizabeth, sticking rigidly to her principles, never openly acknowledged him as her heir, it was now generally and tacitly recognized that he would in due time succeed the ageing Queen of England. For Elizabeth, incredibly, was beginning to grow old. In the climactic year of 1588 she celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of her accession. Not that the Queen was prepared to make any concessions to the passage of time, and it would have been as much as anyone’s place was worth to have reminded her of it. Her health remained excellent and she was as energetic as ever, dancing six or seven galliards in a morning and still riding and hunting tirelessly. But, all the same, time was passing and 1588 brought Elizabeth private sorrow as well as public triumph.
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had been given command of the citizen army hastily recruited to resist the threatened Spanish invasion and it was he who walked bare-headed at the Queen’s bridle hand when she reviewed her troops during the famous visit to Tilbury. It was to be the last time he escorted her in public, so it was fitting that it should have been the most glorious occasion of all. In the middle of August, while the Invincible Armada was being beaten up the North Sea, Robert broke camp and returned to London – a stout, balding, red-faced man in his mid-fifties. He was not at all well, the past few months had been an appalling strain, and he had promised himself a short holiday. He spent a few quiet days with the Queen, dining with her every day, and then left for the country, intending to take the waters at Buxton. On the way he sent Elizabeth an affectionate little note from Rycote Manor, home of her old friends the Norris family, where they had often stayed together in the past. He wanted to know how his gracious lady was – she had been suffering a few twinges lately – ‘it being the chiefest thing in this world I do pray for, that she should have good health and long life.’ As for his own poor case, he wrote, ‘I continue still your medicine and find it amends much better than with any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find a perfect cure at the bath, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycott this Thursday morning, ready to take my journey. …’ He got as far as Cornbury, a few miles from Oxford, and there, on 4 September, he died, possibly from cancer of the stomach.
In the general excitement which followed the defeat of the Armada, the disappearance of this great landmark of the Elizabethan scene passed unmourned and almost unnoticed. At a time when her people expected to see her bathed in the radiance of victory, the Queen could not afford the luxury of giving way to her grief, but she took that note scribbled at Rycote and put it away in a little coffer which she kept by her bed. Across the back she had written ‘His last letter’. Although her relations with Robert had never been quite the same since his second marriage to the widowed Countess of Essex, he was still her ‘brother and best friend’, the man who had been an essential part of her life for almost as long as she could remember. His death, too, tore the first real gap in the ranks of that hand-picked coterie of intimates whom the Queen honoured with pet names and who ruled England under her supervision.
Robert had been her ‘Eyes’. Francis Walsingham, who died in 1590, was ‘the Moor’ – a reference to his dark colouring. Elizabeth had never really liked Walsingham, he was too much of a left-wing Puritan for her taste, but he had been a faithful and valued servant and he, too, had been around for a long time. Christopher Hatton, ‘Mutton’ or ‘Bellwether’, went in 1591 and Francis Knollys in 1597, but the most irreparable loss came in August 1598 with the death of old William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The Queen missed her ‘Spirit’ bitterly. She would often speak of him with tears and turn her face aside when his name was mentioned. Their partnership had lasted for forty years and to Elizabeth its ending meant a break with the past more complete than anything that had gone before. So many of her old friends had vanished now – even her old enemy, Philip of Spain, died that autumn – and the Queen found the new generation growing up around her difficult to understand and to work with. It is true she had Robert Cecil, carefully groomed by his father to take his father’s place, but it was not the same thing. There was never quite the same trust and confidence between them. Elizabeth had problems, too, with Robert Dudley’s step-son, the young Earl of Essex, whom she was trying hard to train up to take Robert’s place at Court. But Essex proved untameable and early in 1601 he paid the price of his paranoia to the executioner on Tower Hill. The Queen sorrowed for the death of a brilliant and beautiful young man, but she never hesitated over its necessity. Essex had committed the unforgivable sin of attempting to challenge the authority of the crown by violence; and when, nearly forty years before, the young Elizabeth Tudor had told William Maitland that as long as she lived she would be Queen of England, she had meant exactly what she said.
The last decade of the Queen’s reign was overshadowed by the troubles in Ireland, by the protracted and inconclusive war with Spain, by faction within the government and by increasing monetary problems. But although the Queen might be growing old – she was well into her sixties now – she remained in full possession of her faculties and in full command of the political situation both at home and abroad. In December 1597 a French diplomat, André de Maisse, came over to London on a special mission from Henri IV and has left an unforgettable picture of Elizabeth as she was.
At his first audience, de Maisse found the Queen en déshabillé. A boil on her face had made her feel wretched she told him and, although she apologized for receiving him in her nightgown, the ambassador evidently got the impression of a somewhat outlandish old lady, perpetually fidgeting about and with a disconcerting habit of opening the front of her robe ‘as if she was too hot’, so that he could see the whole of her bosom. Elizabeth was very affable and ordered a stool to be brought for de Maisse but, he wrote, ‘all the time she spoke she would often rise from her chair and appear to be very impatient with what I was saying. She would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away; yet did she give orders to have it extinguished, making them bring water to pour upon it.’
When de Maisse saw the Queen again a week later, she was feeling better and was rather more conventionally dressed. All the same, he noticed that ‘when she raises her head, she has a trick of putting both hands on her gown and opening it so that all her belly can be seen.’ In the course of conversation Elizabeth often referred to herself as ‘foolish and old’, saying she was sorry de Maisse, who had met so many wise men and great princes, should at length come to see a poor woman and foolish. The ambassador was not deceived by this kind of talk and remarked that the Queen liked to speak slightingly of her intelligence ‘so that she may give occasion to commend her’. She was pleased when he praised her judgement and prudence, but said modestly ‘that it was but natural that she should have some knowledge of the affairs of the world, being called thereto so young, and having worn that crown these forty years.’ ‘When anyone speaks of her beauty’, wrote de Maisse, ‘she says that she was never beautiful, although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless, she speaks of her beauty as often as she can.’
Altogether Elizabeth and de Maisse had about half a dozen interviews. On Christmas Eve the Queen was ‘in very good humour and gay’. De Maisse presented one of his entourage, ‘the secretary Phillips’, and describes how, when Phillips knelt before her, the Queen began to take him by the hair and made him rise and pretended to give him a box on the ears. ‘It is a strange thing’, wrote the ambassador, ‘to see how lively she is in body and mind and nimble in everything she does.’ Elizabeth had obviously taken to de Maisse and talked to him freely on a wide range of subjects, reminiscing and telling him ‘tales of many kinds’. ‘Whilst I was treating with her in the matter of my charge’, he recorded in his journal, ‘she would often make such digressions, either expressly to gain time … or because it is her natural way. Then would she excuse herself, saying, “Master Ambassador, you will say of the tales that I am telling you that they are mere gullery. See what it is to have to do with old women such as I am.”’ But de Maisse thought that apart from her face, which looked ‘very aged’, and her teeth, which were bad, it would not be possible ‘to see a woman of so fine and vigorous disposition both in mind and body.’ She knew all the ancient histories, he wrote, and ‘one can say nothing to her on which she will not make some apt comment.’ In fact, despite her various little oddities, the ambassador had come to feel an enormous respect for the Queen. ‘She is a very great princess who knows every-thing’ was his considered judgement.
André de Maisse was far from being alone in his opinion of this phenomenal woman. Even Pope Sixtus, who was not normally to be counted among Elizabeth Tudor’s admirers, had been moved to declare shortly after the Armada sailed: ‘She certainly is a great Queen and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by all.’ At the time of the highly successful descent on Cadiz in 1596, the Venetians were exclaiming: ‘Great is the Queen of England! Oh, what a woman, if she were but a Christian!’ After the unfortunate Essex affair, the King of France remarked: ‘She only is a king. She only knows how to rule.’
To her own people, Elizabeth had come to embody every goddess of classical mythology they had ever heard of, every heroine from their favourite reading, the Bible. But she also remained their own much loved and familiar queen. A young Londoner, living in the Strand, near St Clement’s Church, was always to remember how, at about five o’clock one dark December evening in the Armada year, he and his friends heard that the Queen had just gone to a Council meeting at Somerset House and were told, ‘if you will see the Queen, you must come quickly’. ‘Then we all ran’, he wrote, ‘when the court gates were set open and no man hindered us from coming in. There we stayed an hour and a half and the yard was full, there being a great number of torches, when the Queen came out in great state. Then we cried, “God save your Majesty.” And the Queen turned to us and said, “God bless you all, my good people.” Then we cried again, “God save your Majesty.” And the Queen said again to us, “Ye may well have a greater prince, but ye shall never have a more loving prince.” And so the Queen and the crowd there, looking upon one another a while, her Majesty departed. This wrought such an impression upon us, for shows and pageants are best seen by torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk of what an admirable Queen she was, and how we would all adventure our lives in her service.’
It cannot be said that the Queen’s temper mellowed with age. She was still quite capable of filling the air with good round oaths and was subject ‘to be vehemently transported with anger’. Elizabeth in a rage could be heard several rooms away and she was not above throwing things – there is a story that she once threw her slipper at Francis Walsingham – or boxing the ears of some unfortunate who had irritated her. Tantrums of this kind, though, were always confined to the family atmosphere of the Court and council chamber, and, more often than not, the Queen’s bark was worse than her bite. ‘When she smiled’, wrote her godson, John Harington, who frankly adored her, ‘it was a pure sunshine.’ Elizabeth could be tricky, exacting and infuriating, and not infrequently drove her long-suffering councillors to the point of nervous breakdown – strong men would totter from her presence in tears and babbling of resignation – but her methods undoubtedly got results and her fascination remained irresistible. Harington remembered that Christopher Hatton was wont to say ‘the Queen did fish for men’s souls, and had so sweet a bait that no one could escape her network.’
Elizabeth kept all her old aversion to the idea of marriage – her own and other people’s – but she did, on one occasion, show some curiosity on the subject. John Harington records that ‘the Queen did once ask my wife in merry sort, how she kept my good will and love.’
My Mall, in wise and discreet manner, told her Highness she had confidence in her husband’s understanding and courage, well-founded on her own steadfastness not to offend or thwart, but to cherish and obey. Hereby she did persuade her husband of her own affection, and in so doing did command his. ‘Go to, go to, mistress’, saith the Queen, ‘you are wisely bent, I find. After such sort do I keep the good will of all my husbands, my good people; for if they did not rest assured of some special love toward them, they would not readily yield me such good obedience.’
Harington thought this anecdote deserved noting, ‘as being both wise and pleasant’. In fact, of course, it reveals much of the secret of Elizabeth’s success. Her loving relationship with her good people, which enabled one woman to rule a tough, independent-minded, quarrelsome nation virtually by the force of her personality, was no accident. Like all relationships it had to be worked for, and all her long reign Elizabeth Tudor never once forgot that – never took the goodwill of all her husbands for granted. In that one simple fact lay the essence of her genius.
Elizabeth remained astonishingly fit and active almost to the very end. In August 1602 Robert Cecil noted that she had not been in better health for twelve years and was still riding every day and hunting. In September the Earl of Worcester wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury. ‘We are frolic here at court; much dancing in the Privy Chamber of country dances before the Queen’s majesty who is exceedingly pleased therewith’. Later in the month, another correspondent was telling the Countess of Shrewsbury, ‘The best news I can yet write your ladyship is of the Queen’s health and disposition of body, which I assure you is excellent good. And I have not seen her every way better disposed these many years.’ Elizabeth had been fortunate in inheriting her father’s splendid constitution and, unlike him, had never abused it. She always been extremely fastidious in matters of personal hygiene; had always taken plenty of fresh air and exercise and been notably abstemious over food and drink. She had also, wisely, avoided the ministrations of the royal physicians whenever possible. Perhaps, though, the real reason for her continued physical well-being was that she had been lucky enough to spend her life doing something she thoroughly enjoyed and was supremely good at.
But not even Elizabeth was immortal – though to James of Scotland it sometimes seemed as if she might be. She was now in her seventieth year, a great age for her times, and had lived considerably longer than any other member of her house, but when John Harington came to Court in December he was shocked at the change he saw in her. ‘Our dear Queen, my royal godmother and this state’s most natural mother, doth now bear show of human infirmity’, he wrote to his wife. Elizabeth seemed very depressed and when Harington, in an attempt to cheer her up, read her some of his witty verses, she smiled but said, ‘When thou dost feel creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less. I am past my relish for such matters.’ She was eating hardly anything now and, for the first time, there were signs that her memory was beginning to fail. ‘But who’, wrote her godson sadly, ‘shall say that “your Highness hath forgotten”?’
Harington must have seen her on a bad day, for she rallied again. Christmas was spent with all the usual gaieties and in January the Queen was said to be in excellent health. On the twenty-first the Court moved down to Richmond. The weather had turned very cold, but Elizabeth insisted on wearing ‘summer-like garments’. On 6 February she received the new Venetian ambassador, dressed in white and silver, her hair ‘of a light colour never made by nature’ and apparently in good spirits. She addressed Scaramelli in his own language and said at the end of the audience – ‘I do not know if I have spoken Italian well; still I think so, for I learnt it when a child and believe I have not forgotten it.’ Elizabeth was still in harness, busy with Irish affairs but finding her daily routine more and more of a strain. Towards the end of February her closest woman friend, the Countess of Nottingham, died. The Queen’s mood of depression returned and this time she did not recover.
Early in March her young relative, Robert Carey, grandson of her aunt Mary Boleyn, came down to Richmond to see her and found her in one of her withdrawing chambers ‘sitting low upon her cushions’. ‘She took me by the hand’, he wrote, ‘and wrung it hard and said, “No, Robin, I am not well”; and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days, and in her discourse she fetched forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight, for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded.’ Carey did his best ‘to persuade her from this melancholy humour’, but found ‘it was too deep-rooted in her heart and hardly to be removed.’ This was on a Saturday evening. Next day the Queen was unable to go to church as usual and instead heard the service lying on cushions in her privy chamber. ‘From that day forwards’, says Robert Carey, ‘she grew worse and worse. She remained upon her cushions four days and nights at the least. All about her could not persuade her to take any sustenance or go to bed.’
Elizabeth had always said that she did not desire to live longer than would be for her subjects’ good. Now it seemed as if she felt her task was done. She had outlived her century, outlived nearly all her friends and her usefulness to her beloved country, and she wanted to make an end. Recently the coronation ring, the outward and visible token of her symbolic marriage to the kingdom of England which, for nearly forty-five years, had never left her finger, had grown into the flesh and had to be cut away. It was an omen. ‘The Queen grew worse and worse,’ said Robert Carey significantly, ‘because she would be so.’ Still no one could persuade her to go to bed. Eventually her cousin, the Lord Admiral, was sent for and partly by persuasion, partly by force, he succeeded in getting her off her cushions and into bed. There, temporarily, she felt a little better and was able to take some broth. But ‘there was no hope of her recovery, because she refused all remedies.’
The immediate physical cause of Elizabeth’s last illness seems to have been a streptococcal throat infection, possibly connected with dental sepsis, but soon pneumonia set in and she lay speechless and semi-conscious, her eyes open, one finger in her mouth. The story which had begun so long ago in blood and battle under the fiery banner of the red dragon was ending now in the great, richly furnished bedchamber at Richmond Palace where a tired old woman waited for her release.
Elizabeth died in the small hours of Thursday, 24 March 1603 – ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’ – and Robert Carey, who had been standing by with a horse ready saddled, dashed away through the night on the first stage of his wild ride north to tell Margaret Tudor’s great-grandson that the waiting was over. Hempe was spun and England done and the last English sovereign of the English nation lay at peace.