What is conveniently known as the second Alençon courtship opened in 1578 and continued intermittently into the early 1580s. Like all Elizabeth’s foreign flirtations with matrimony, it was initiated and prolonged for purely political reasons. What marks it out from its predecessors is the undoubted fact that, for a period of several months during the summer of 1579, Elizabeth managed to convince almost everyone – including perhaps herself – that this time she really was in earnest; that after all those years of obstinate and apparently contented spinsterhood she really did genuinely want to marry an ugly little Frenchman more than twenty years her junior.
Except that they had become considerably more complex and more menacing, the problems facing the Queen in the late seventies were basically much the same as those of the late sixties. On the home front, Mary Queen of Scots, that perennial threat to the government’s peace of mind, was still a state prisoner, still intriguing incessantly with her friends abroad, still hoping against hope that her Guise relations, or the Pope, or Philip of Spain, or all three together would one day succeed in getting her out of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody and on to Elizabeth’s throne. Since Elizabeth flatly refused to consider the solution to the problem of Mary favoured by the House of Commons after the discovery of the Ridolfi Plot – to cut off her head and make no more ado about her – and since the prospect of finding a formula by which she could safely be returned to Scotland looked as remote as ever, there seemed nothing for it but to continue to keep her under restraint in England and hope to frustrate her more flamboyant schemes.
A new complication at home was the apparent revival of English Catholicism under the leadership of missionary priests, trained in seminaries in Douai and Rome, who had begun to infiltrate the country by the middle of the decade. In spite of the somewhat hysterical publicity they attracted, the missionaries came too late and too few to do much more than blow on the embers of a dying fire and coax the spark of faith into a tiny flame. By themselves they could never have caused much more than a minor irritation to the Protestant state. But taken in conjunction with the papal bull of excommunication, with the lack of a Protestant heir and the presence of a vigorous Catholic claimant on English soil, they represented a potentially serious danger which could not be ignored, and as a result many brave and sincere men suffered the unpleasant form of death normally reserved for more obvious traitors.
Abroad, European politics were still dominated by the growing might of Philip’s empire. In the years immediately following the holocaust of St Bartholomew, when it seemed as if the French alliance would have to be written off, Elizabeth had succeeded, at least temporarily, in mending her fences with Spain. In 1578, Elizabeth and Philip were still just about on speaking terms, but few informed observers of the international scene believed that a confrontation could be postponed indefinitely. Harassed by the depradations of English privateers on his American trade, and increasingly convinced that he would never suppress his Dutch rebels while they continued to receive handouts from Elizabeth, even the slow-moving Philip would sooner or later use the Pope’s interdict as an excuse for dealing with the heretical Queen as she deserved.
It was the war in the Netherlands which led more or less directly to the resumption of the Alençon courtship. Elizabeth, to the sorrow of her more radical Protestant advisers, did not like the Dutch. She lent them enough money to keep the rebel forces in being, but regarded them as greedy, quarrelsome, unreliable and Calvinist. In present circumstances, William of Orange and his brother Count Louis were performing a useful service by tying Philip down in a costly and unprofitable war of attrition, but Elizabeth was determined that her own involvement should be kept to a minimum. In the long term she was interested in a negotiated settlement, for in the long term England’s national security and economic prosperity depended heavily on a peaceful and prosperous Netherlands. She was therefore alarmed and irritated when the French King’s brother began to take an interest in Dutch affairs. Least of all did she want to see another round of the perennial Habsburg–Valois quarrel fought out on her own doorstep; besides which it had always been a cardinal point of English foreign policy to keep the French out of the Low Countries.
But when, in the spring of 1578, it became apparent that Alençon was playing a lone hand Elizabeth’s attitude changed. If the Duke could be lured by the bait of marriage she ought, with any luck, to be able to control his future activities and use him to serve her purposes by making trouble for Philip without involving her too closely. It would certainly be considerably cheaper than the alternative course of paying the Dutch to send him away. It would also be safer, for if Philip should turn nasty the threat of approaching Anglo-French nuptials would serve to put the frighteners on.
Alençon himself was nothing loath, and indeed the first approaches seem to have come from him. Charles IX having died childless, the French throne was now occupied by Henry of Anjou, Elizabeth’s former reluctant suitor, and the Valois family pattern was repeating itself. Alençon, restless, ambitious and dissatisfied with his lot, was on bad terms with his brother and rapidly becoming as much of a domestic nuisance as ever Anjou had been. His attempts to carve a career and a patrimony for himself in the Netherlands had not so far met with any noticeable success and he knew he could expect no help from home. The Queen of England was still, as Francis Walsingham put it, ‘the best marriage in her parish’ and even to become her official suitor would give him useful additional status. If she could be cajoled into financing his plans for his own self-aggrandisement, so much the better, and the Duke began to write winning letters assuring the Queen of his entire devotion and willingness to be guided by her in all his doings.1
By late summer the courtship was once more a live issue, although at this stage no one seriously supposed that it would lead to anything more than another prolonged bout of negotiations. The character of the affair began to change early in 1579 when Alençon sent his best friend, Jean Simier, to England with full powers to negotiate and conclude the marriage contract and also, it would appear, instructions to do his best to sweep Elizabeth off her feet, for Simier, who proved to be the epitome of every Englishman’s idea of a gallant Frenchman – ‘a most choice courtier, exquisitely skilled in love toys, pleasant conceits and court dalliances’ – at once embarked on an ardent proxy wooing. Presumably he and his master reckoned that such an approach would be irresistible to a middle-aged spinster and it looked, for a time at least, as if they might have guessed right.
Elizabeth was charmed with Simier. He was rapidly admitted to the ranks of those privileged few known by royal nicknames, becoming the Queen’s Monkey in a punning reference to his own surname. He was allowed to capture ‘trophies’ in the shape of gloves and handkerchiefs – even to mount a daring raid on the royal bedchamber and carry off one of the royal nightcaps. But, although Elizabeth blossomed under the life-giving ran of Simier’s admiration (the French ambassador told Catherine de Medici that the Queen seemed quite rejuvenated and more beautiful than she had been fifteen years before), and appeared in some danger of losing her heart, she showed absolutely no signs of losing her head. Not all her new friend’s skill in love toys or pleasant conceits could induce her to make any commitment. She told the current Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, that it was a fine thing for an old woman like her to be thinking of marriage and more than hinted that she was only encouraging Alençon to get him out of the Netherlands. In any case, she said, nothing could be settled until he had been over to see her.2
But by this time most people thought he would come and that he would not come in vain. Elizabeth herself had promised him that his honour would not suffer and Catherine de Medici was urging her son to take the plunge. ‘I am sure’, she wrote on 29 March, ‘she [Elizabeth] will not be so ill advised as to let you return discontented, for she knows the wrong she would do in abusing the brother of so great a king.’3 Gilbert Talbot told his father, the Earl of Shrewsbury, in a letter written from the court on 4 April that for the past five days the Privy Council had been continuously in session from eight o’clock in the morning until dinner time, ‘and presently after dinner and an hour’s conference with her Majesty, to council again and so till supper time. And all this,’ he went on, ‘as far as I can learn, is about the matter of Monsieur’s coming hither, his entertainment here and what demands are to be made unto him in the treaty of marriage … and I can assure your lordship it is verily thought this marriage will come to pass of a great sort of wise men.’4
A committee of the Council had now begun to negotiate with Simier on the basis of the proposals put forward by the French when the Anjou marraige had been under consideration eight years previously, but it was clear that no real progress would be made unless and until Alençon himself came to England. In any case, the councillors were deeply divided over the advisability of the whole project. The Earl of Leicester and Francis Walsingham (now back at home as Principal Secretary of State) were both strongly opposed, while Lord Burghley and the Earl of Sussex were in favour. The arguments in favour of the Queen’s marriage were basically the same as they had always been – the obvious advantages of an alliance with a major foreign power sealed by family ties and the hope of an undisputed heir to the throne. The old arguments against – that the only possible husband for the Queen was a foreigner and a Catholic – were now reinforced both by the deepening of the ideological divide and by fears that Elizabeth’s life would be endangered if she were to become pregnant – she would be forty-six on her next birthday.
Leicester’s objections were probably mainly personal but, as was shortly to become apparent, he was hardly in a position to complain. Walsingham’s opinion, set out in a closely reasoned memorandum, was coloured by his deep distrust of all the Catholic powers. While not minimising the dangers facing the Queen at home and abroad, he believed that her best policy would be to trust in the Protestant God and keep clear of any entanglement with the representatives of anti-Christ. Alençon might not be a bigoted Catholic, but he was still a Catholic and as heir presumptive to the French throne would hardly be willing to jeopardise his inheritance by abjuring his religion. However compelling the political case for the marriage, Walsingham, after St Bartholomew, was convinced that every right-thinking Englishman would far rather Elizabeth stayed single than see her ally herself to a nasty unhealthy set of foreigners like the Valois and perhaps risk her life in childbirth.5
Against this, Sussex and Lord Burghley clung to the old-fashioned belief that any husband would be better than none and Burghley pooh-poohed the idea that the Queen was too old to have a child. The proportions of her body were excellent and she suffered from no physical impediment such as smallness of stature or largeness of body, ‘nor no sickness, nor lack of natural functions in those things that properly belong to the procreation of children’ he wrote in one of his careful aides-mémoire to himself. In the judgement of her doctors and those women who knew her estate in such matters and were most intimately acquainted with her body, there was no reason at all why she should not safely bear children for some time to come. Indeed there was every reason to believe that her Majesty was ‘very apt for the procreation of children’. Burghley even thought that the therapeutic effects of sexual intercourse might cure Elizabeth’s neuralgic pains and improve her health and spirits generally, for she would be spared ‘the dolours and infirmities as all physicians do usually impute to womankind for lack of marriage, and specially to such women as naturally have their bodies apt to conceive and procreate children’.6
But Burghley seems to have been pretty much alone in his optimistic assessment of Elizabeth’s childbearing prospects, and the Queen’s closest advisers remained divided and hesitant in the face of the Queen’s unexpected enthusiasm. According to Mendoza, writing early in May, she was now expressing ‘such a strong desire to marry that not a councillor, whatever his opinion may be, dares to say a word against it’.7 Nevertheless, at a full council meeting held a few days later, opinion was almost universally hostile. Again according to Mendoza, the new Lord Chancellor, Thomas Bromley, pointed out ‘how bad this talk of marriage was, both for the Queen and the nation, since no succession could be hoped from it, and great confusion might be caused by the coming hither of Catholics, and above all Frenchmen, who were their ancient enemies’. Simier was then summoned and told that several of Alençon’s demands – including coronation immediately after the marriage, a life pension of £60,000 and the garrisoning of a port by French soldiers for his own protection – were totally inadmissible.
At this the normally suave Simier lost his temper and, slamming his way out of the room, went straight to the Queen. She listened to him ‘with much graciousness and many expressions of sorrow that her councillors disapproved of her marriage which she desired so much’, and proceeded to assume a settled air of lovelorn melancholy. Mendoza heard that she had ‘twice said when she was retired in her chamber “they need not think that it is going to end in this way; I must get married”’.8
There was much coming and going of envoys from France over the next few weeks, with the result that Alençon abated most of his preconditions – though he was still insisting on the private exercise of his religion. The negotiations were on again and Simier was ordered ‘to use every possible means to attract and satisfy the lords and gentry of the kingdom’, for which purpose money would be available. ‘Simier has begun to do this already,’ commented Mendoza on 14 May, ‘and has given two grand banquets this week to the Council.’9
But in spite of the free food, and in spite of a lavish scattering of bribes and expensive presents, the opposition was not appeased. There were two rather amateurish attempts to assassinate Simier during the summer, both of which were blamed on the Earl of Leicester’s party. It was after the second of these that a justifiably irritated Simier, who had been keeping his ear to the ground since his arrival in England, decided that the time was ripe to strike back at his most dangerous adversary and chose a propitious moment to pass on to the Queen an interesting piece of information about her precious Robert Dudley. He had, it seemed, been secretly married for nearly a year to Lettice, the widowed Countess of Essex – the same Lettice who, as Viscountess Hereford, had been the cause of so much ill-feeling back in the sixties.
If the Frenchman had hoped to provoke an explosion of wrath against the opponents of the marriage and smooth the way for Alençon’s visit, he certainly succeeded brilliantly. The Queen, according to William Camden’s account of the matter, ‘grew into such a chafe that she commanded Leicester not to stir out of the palace of Greenwich and intended to have committed him to the Tower of London, which his enemies much desired. But the Earl of Sussex, though his greatest and deadliest adversary, dissuaded her. For he was of opinion that no man was to be troubled for lawful marriage, which estate amongst all men hath ever been held in honour and esteem.’10
Good faithful old Sussex managed to calm Elizabeth down and prevent her from making a fool of herself in public, but her rage against Robert was still terrible. Not only had he deceived and betrayed her, but he’d also had the unspeakable gall to oppose her own marriage when all the time he was married himself! As for Robert, after a brief period of house arrest at Court, he retreated to his house at Wanstead and wrote mournfully to Lord Burghley of his grief at the Queen’s bitter unkindness after twenty years’ faithful service. ‘And,’ he went on, ‘as I carried myself almost more than a bondsman many a year together, so long as one drop of comfort was left of any hope, as you yourself, my Lord, doth well know, so being acquitted and delivered of that hope, and, by both open and private protestations and declarations discharged, methinks it is more than hard to take such an occasion to bear so great displeasure for.’11
It might seem hard that, having refused him herself, Elizabeth should now be creating such an uproar over Robert’s marriage. But, as Robert very well knew, this was not an area ruled by logic. He had always occupied a unique position – the Queen’s own creation and her special property. It was a position which had always carried its drawbacks as well as many solid material advantages, and while he could still dream of one day founding a royal Dudley dynasty he had been prepared to put up with any number of drawbacks. Now that old dream was finally dead and buried and it was time, more than time, to think of the future. Robert still loved Elizabeth in his own way, a relationship such as theirs could not have survived as it did without a solid basis of mutual affection and respect, but, as he stoutly told Lord Burghley, he was not prepared to be her slave. He wanted a wife and he wanted a son to carry on his name. This, of course, was a perfectly legitimate aspiration and one which Robert had evidently reasoned he should now be in a strong enough place to achieve without losing the Queen altogether. But, knowing the Queen’s autocratic and naturally possessive temperament, he can hardly have expected to achieve it without an almighty row – hence his reluctance to make the matter public and face the inevitable consequences.
Meanwhile Elizabeth was showing a determinedly sprightly face to the world as she got ready to welcome her latest suitor – for Alençon was at last on the point of leaving for England to try his luck in person. ‘She is burning with impatience for his coming,’ commented Mendoza rather sourly, ‘although her councillors have laid before her the difficulties which might arise … She is largely influenced by the idea that it should be known that her talents and beauty are so great, that they have sufficed to cause him to come and visit her without any assurance that he will be her husband.’12
The Duke reached Greenwich in the early hours of 17 August and later that day Elizabeth dined with him privately in Simier’s rooms. His presence in the palace was supposed to be a secret, which put councillors and royal servants in the embarrassing position of having to pretend to be deaf and blind, but one thing was clear from the outset – from a personal point of view the visit was proving a triumphant success. Alençon might be a funny little man with a pock-marked complexion and a bulbous nose, but he was also charming, intelligent and witty. He became the Queen’s Frog and the French ambassador hastened to inform Catherine de Medici that ‘the lady has with difficulty been able to entertain the Duke, being captivated, overcome with love. She told me she had never found a man whose nature and actions suited her better.’13 Mendoza, too, was obliged to admit to Philip that ‘the Queen is delighted with Alençon and he with her, as she has let out to some of her courtiers, saying that she was pleased to have known him, was much taken with his good parts and admired him more than any man. She said that, for her part, she will not prevent his being her husband.’14
A grand ball was held at Greenwich on Sunday the twenty-third at which Elizabeth danced much more than usual, constantly waving and smiling at the Duke, who watched the proceedings not very adequately hidden behind a curtain. But for all this showing off, and for all the billing and cooing going on at the Palace, there had so far been, as Mendoza did not fail to point out, no sign ‘that any resolution has been arrived at’ and King Philip remained highly sceptical, convinced that the whole thing was mere pretence. Nevertheless, the party which opposed the marriage had taken grave alarm. ‘Leicester,’ reported Mendoza on 25 August, ‘is in great grief.’ Robert had recently had an interview with the Queen, after which his emotion was remarked, and that same evening a meeting of the opposition took place at the Earl of Pembroke’s house, the Sidneys and various other friends and relatives of the Dudley clan being present. According to Mendoza, ‘some of them afterwards remarked that Parliament would have something to say as to whether the Queen married or not. ‘The people in general’, he added hopefully, ‘seem to threaten a revolution about it.’15
Alençon went home on the twenty-ninth and, although he and the Queen immediately began a hectic exchange of love letters, it seemed that no promises had yet been given. Meanwhile popular expressions of hostility to the marriage were growing. As far back as April, Gilbert Talbot had noted that the preachers were busy ‘to apply their sermons to tend covertly against this marriage, many of them inveighing greatly thereat’; and during August, probably while Alençon was still at Greenwich, the Puritan writer John Stubbs published his famous pamphlet The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereunto England is like to be swallowed by another French Marriage.
Stubbs did not mince his words. The Queen was too old now to think of marriage and it was all a devilish French trick to push the matter so eagerly just at a time when childbearing was likely to be most dangerous to her. If only she would honestly consult her most faithful and wise physicians, they would tell her how fearful was the expectation of death. As for Alençon, he was rotten with debauchery – ‘the old serpent himself in the form of a man come a second time to seduce the English Eve and to ruin the English Paradise’. If his mass was once allowed into the country it would be ‘as wildfire that all the seas could not quench’ and would seriously imperil the true Protestant faith.16
John Stubbs was not the only man to commit his objections to paper. Philip Sidney, Robert Dudley’s beloved and brilliant nephew, also wrote earnestly to the Queen, begging her not to alienate the affection of her loyal Protestant subjects – ‘your chief, if not your sole, strength’ – by marrying a Frenchman and a papist, one whom even the common people knew to be the son of ‘a Jezebel of our age’.17
Sidney had at least had the tact to address himself to the Queen’s private ear and he escaped with an angry scolding. But Stubbs’ provocative diatribe, which was attracting wide publicity, roused Elizabeth to real fury. She issued a fierce proclamation against the dissemination of all such lewd and seditious libels and ordered the arrest of Stubbs and his printer. They were prosecuted, ironically enough, under a statute originally framed to protect Philip of Spain when he was Mary’s consort and sentenced to lose their right hands. The execution was carried out in the presence of a silently sympathetic crowd but it did not stifle the growing radical agitation which was beginning ominously to resemble that which had preceded Mary’s marriage.
However, it seemed that Elizabeth meant to go ahead with her plans. Early in October she summoned the Council to discuss the matter and give her its considered advice, but after a series of meetings, one of which lasted without a break from eight in the morning till seven o’clock at night, it was clear that a majority of the members were still very unhappy about the whole thing. Their objections were summed up in a minute in Lord Burghley’s hand, dated 6 October and headed ‘Causes of Misliking of the Marriage’. These included the fact that Alençon was a Frenchman, ‘the people of this realm naturally hating that nation’, and the fact that he would in all probability shortly succeed his ailing and childless brother as King of France, with the obvious complications that would entail. Then there was ‘the doubt that her Majesty either shall not have children, or that she may be endangered in child-birth’. Much as everyone wanted an heir to the throne, no one wanted to see the Queen risk her precious life. Her constitution was, after all, so good that, without courting the perils of marriage, she seemed ‘like to live long’. Also, as someone pointed out, there was no guarantee that Monsieur would prove a kind and considerate husband. On the contrary, the huge discrepancy in their ages and their difference in religion hardly augured for ‘a hearty love of her Majesty’. The difference in religion, of course, remained ‘the greatest inconvenience’ to those council members who foresaw that Alençon’s Catholicism ‘shall be a comfort to all obstinate Papists in England and a discomfort to all the subjects of good religion’.18
In spite of the weight of opinion against him, Lord Burghley still favoured the French marriage – at least, he painted a gloomy picture of the dangers to the realm from the unsettled succession (especially as Elizabeth grew older), from the pretensions of Mary Stuart and from foreign aggression if the Queen did not marry. Probably, though, the argument which influenced him most strongly was that Elizabeth herself appeared to want the marriage so much. Eventually it was decided that this was a matter on which the Council as a body could not advise – each individual member would state his position if required and each would do his best to carry out her wishes – but the Queen would have to make up her own mind first.
When this message was conveyed to the Queen on the morning of 7 October by a four-man committee headed by Lord Burghley, it got a stormy reception. Elizabeth burst into tears and reproached her faithful councillors bitterly for doubting that there could be any better safeguard for the realm than ‘to have her marry and have a child of her own body to inherit and so to continue the line of King Henry VIII’. Since this was precisely what her faithful councillors had been urging her to do throughout all the years when it might have been physically practicable – advice which she had consistently refused to accept – such reproaches must have seemed unreasonable to put it mildly, though none of those present ventured to say so. The Queen went on to curse herself for her ‘simplicity’ in allowing the matter to be debated at all, but she had expected, so she said, to have had ‘a universal request made to her to proceed in this marriage’. Then, being too upset to continue, she dismissed the committee until the afternoon.
When they returned, the conversation was resumed along much the same lines, the Queen showing ‘her great misliking’ of anyone who opposed her marriage. As for the religious difficulty, ‘she did marvel that any person would think so slenderly of her, as that she would not for God’s cause, for herself, her surety and her people, have no straight regard thereto as none ought to make that such a doubt, as for it to forbear marriage and to have the Crown settled in her child’.19
After this remarkable display, there was nothing for the committee to do but report back to the full Council her Majesty’s ‘earnest disposition for this her marriage’. ‘And thereupon,’ recorded Lord Burghley, ‘after long consultations had, all the Council accorded upon a new offer to be made to her Majesty of all our assents to offer our service in furtherance of this marriage, if so it shall please her.’20
The offer was duly made next day ‘by the mouth of the Lord Chancellor’, but was not received in any very gracious spirit. ‘Her Majesty’s answers were very sharp in reprehending of all such as she thought would make arguments against her marriage … and though she thought not meet to declare to us whether she would marry Monsieur or no, yet she looked at our hands that we did so much desire her marriage and to have children of her body, as we should have with one accord have made special suit to her for the same.’21
In spite of having apparently got what she wanted, Elizabeth remained in an exceedingly bad temper. She was still not speaking to the Earl of Leicester and had quarrelled furiously with Francis Walsingham, whom she suspected of being behind much of the popular agitation against the marriage. According to Bernardino de Mendoza, she was ‘so cross and melancholy that it was noticed by everyone who approached her’.
Meanwhile, Simier, who had now been hanging about for nearly a year, was getting impatient and badgering the Queen for a decision. On 9 November they were closeted together for several hours and on the following day she summoned the principal councillors to her chamber ‘and told them that she had determined to marry and that they need say nothing more to her about it, but should at once discuss what was necessary for carrying it out’.22 This sounded like hard news at last but, as Mendoza told Philip a fortnight later, ‘these people change so constantly in whatever they take in hand, that it is difficult to send your Majesty any definite information’.23 Elizabeth had apparently changed her mind overnight and a messenger on his way to Alençon was stopped at Dover and recalled.
The Queen was now talking about getting every councillor to give his opinion of the marriage in writing. When Simier heard of this and protested at what looked like a deliberate delaying tactic, she complained that the Council leaked like a sieve. Her next move was an attempt to persuade that much-tried body to write a collective letter to Alençon urging him to come back to England as soon as possible, ‘whereupon they replied that it was not for them but for her to do that’. They also, according to Mendoza, told her that someone of greater standing than Simier should be sent to complete the negotiations. The result was more trouble with Simier’s wounded feelings and eventually, towards the end of November, a small committee, from which both Leicester and Walsingham were excluded, was set up to finalise the draft of the marriage contract. This was completed within a few days and conceded to Alençon and all his household the right to hear mass in their private chapel.24
But even now Elizabeth had been careful to leave herself an escape-route. She could not marry without her subjects’ consent and must therefore be granted a two months’ breathing-space during which she would do her very best to win them over to the idea. If she failed, then the engagement was to be regarded as broken off.25
Simier left for France on 24 November, laden with expensive presents and handsomely escorted. In December, Elizabeth talked to Mendoza on the subject of her marriage and ‘referred to it so tenderly as to make it clear how ardently she desired it’. In January she had become perceptibly less enthusiastic. Leicester and Walsingham were both back at court by this time, and significantly the Queen was now herself raising the religious barrier. She wrote sorrowfully to her Frog telling him that in spite of all her efforts it seemed the English would never accept his mass, so, if he could not give it up, perhaps they had better forget about marriage and remain just good friends.
Had she ever been really serious? A number of learned historians have believed that she was, at least for a time, and have seen her as an ageing lonely woman snatching desperately at an eleventh-hour chance of marriage and motherhood. Well, maybe, and yet it is somehow very difficult to visualise Elizabeth Tudor, that supremely successful career woman, surrendering herself to a man fully young enough to be her own son; being willing, as Philip Sidney put it, to deliver him the keys of her kingdom and live at his discretion. At the same time, there has to be some explanation of her uncharacteristic behaviour during the summer and autumn of 1579. She was, of course, approaching if she had not already begun the menopause and this, combined with the emotional shock of Leicester’s marriage, may well have thrown her temporarily off balance. There are other possible explanations. For more than twenty years Elizabeth had been using the courtship ploy at every opportunity, likely and unlikely, in her relations with foreign countries and, apart from the obvious advantages it gave her in the diplomatic poker game, there can be little doubt that she also derived more complicated satisfactions from the elaborate teasing of her prospective bridegrooms – satisfactions to do with the exercise of sexual power and the gratification of sexual vanity. As little as any other woman did the Queen enjoy being reminded of the passing years, but at forty-six she knew well enough that the time for playing her favourite game was coming to an end and, like any great actress making perhaps her last appearance in a role which has made her famous, she would naturally want the occasion to be a memorable one. It was ironical, too, that in this her final courtship Elizabeth should for the first time have found a supporting case worthy of her talents. Unlike the comically boorish Scandinavians, the stodgy Germanic Charles von Habsburg and sulky Anjou, young Alençon had been only too willing to enter into the spirit of the thing. He and Simier were both finished products of a society which regarded the making of courtly love as an art form and, bearing in mind the value of the prize they were after, neither grudged the expenditure of his best efforts. It was all a new and intoxicating experience for Elizabeth and perhaps it is hardly surprising that she should have allowed herself to be carried away. The illusion of renewed youth and beauty died on the morning on 7 October as she looked into the worried faces of some of her oldest friends and the awakening, it seemed, was bitter.
Illusion might be dead, but the Alençon courtship was still very much alive. The Queen was back at her old tricks of blowing hot and cold and driving sober statesmen like Francis Walsingham to distraction. ‘I would to God,’ he moaned, ‘her Highness would resolve one way or the other touching the matter of her marriage.’ Walsingham liked the idea no more than he had ever done, but he was terrified that Elizabeth would play fast and loose once too often and end up by offending the French past repair. ‘If her Majesty be not already resolved touching her marriage,’ he wrote to the Earl of Sussex, ‘it will behove her to grow to some speedy resolution therein, for the entertaining of it doth breed her greater dishonour than I dare commit to paper, besides the danger she daily incurreth for not settling of her estate, which dependeth altogether on the marriage.’26
Walsingham’s alarm was understandable, for as the year 1580 unfolded the international scene could hardly have looked much bleaker from England’s point of view. Spain’s annexation of Portugal that summer gave Philip control of the entire Iberian peninsula. It gave him the use of the fine Portuguese navy and the revenues of Portugal’s colonial empire in the east to add to those of his own empire in the west, making him – on paper at least – the richest and most powerful monarch the world had ever seen. Across the North Sea, Alexander of Parma, the new Spanish commander in the Netherlands, was having a considerable run of success against the Dutch rebels, and now trouble threatened even nearer home, across the Scottish Border, where Mary Stuart’s son was growing up. Unfortunately, young James’s adolescent revolt against the restraints of his strictly Calvinist upbringing was taking the form of an ominous desire to hobnob with his mother’s Guise relations – and that connection boded no good to Protestant England. In Protestant England itself, 1580 saw the arrival of the first Jesuit missionary priests, Fathers Campion and Parsons, and their startling, if short-lived, success among the Catholic minority caused acute alarm in government circles.
It was certainly no time for the Queen to make a single unnecessary enemy and, if ever she had needed friends, surely she needed them now. But Elizabeth refused to be deflected – she would go her own way just as she had always done. She was angling now for a new league with France without marriage, just as she had done ten years earlier, but this time the King of France and the Queen-Mother stood firm. They were determined to pin down the elusive virgin, to saddle her with responsibility for the volatile Alençon and ensure that she paid her full share of the price of war with Spain. As for Alençon himself, he was in the classic position of all adventurers in pursuit of an heiress and could not afford to take offence. He grumbled over the Queen’s inconstancy but he had not lost hope, and the Queen took care that he should not. In April 1581, when one of her garters fell off during the famous visit to Sir Francis Drake on board the Golden Hind at Deptford, she allowed the French ambassador to ‘capture’ it as a trophy for the lovelorn Frog.27
Failing marriage, Alençon’s plan was to coax or blackmail Elizabeth into giving him money. He was already deep in debt, having borrowed lavishly on his expectations, and had now just about reached the end of his resources. If he could not get more backing from somewhere soon, he would have to abandon his ambitions in the Netherlands and return empty-handed to his brother’s unfriendly court. In the summer of 1581 the Queen finally opened her purse to the extent of lending her impecunious suitor £30,000, which was better than nothing but still nothing like enough, and Frog came to the conclusion that his best chance of getting more would be to go a-wooing again. He landed at Rye on 31 October and received a warm welcome. All the old routine of dalliance was resumed, Elizabeth making an enormous fuss of her prince frog, her little Moor, her little Italian and, according to gossip relayed by the Venetians, visiting him very morning while he was still in bed to take him a cup of broth; while Frog himself yearned eloquently to be allowed into her bed to show what a good companion he could be.
Mendoza reported that the French ambassadors and the Duke’s own companions ‘look upon the marriage as an accomplished fact, but the English in general scoff at it, saying that he is only after money … It is certain’, went on Mendoza in a letter to Philip dated 11 November, ‘that the Queen will do her best to avoid offending him, and to pledge him in the affairs of the Netherlands, in order to drive his brother into a rupture with your Majesty, which is her great object, whilst she keeps her hands free and can stand by looking on at the war.’28
What is certain is that Elizabeth was doing her utmost to inveigle the King of France into agreeing to share the cost of supporting Alençon and a good deal of hard bargaining was going on behind the screen of slightly farcical love-making. But Henri III refused to commit himself to anything until he was sure of the Queen and, although Mendoza heard from a reliable source that ‘when the Queen and Alençon were alone together she pledges herself to him to his heart’s content, and as much as any woman could to a man’, she would not allow anything to be said publicly.
Matters came to a head on the morning of 22 November, when Elizabeth and her Frog were walking together in the gallery at Whitehall, Leicester and Walsingham being also present. Again according to Mendoza’s account: ‘the French ambassador entered and said that he wished to write to his master, from whom he had received orders to hear from the Queen’s own lips her intention with regard to marrying his brother. She replied, “You may write this to the King: that the Duke of Alençon shall be my husband”, and at the same moment she turned to Alençon and kissed him on the mouth, drawing a ring from her own hand and giving it to him as a pledge. Alençon gave her a ring of his in return, and shortly afterwards the Queen summoned the ladies and gentlemen from the presence chamber in the gallery, repeating to them in a loud voice in Alençon’s presence what she had previously said.’29
The Queen could scarcely have gone further in her efforts to convince the French of her good faith. ‘The standers-by’, says William Camden, ‘took it that the marriage was now contracted by promise’ (a promise to marry made before witnesses constituted a legally binding contract), and the episode naturally created a considerable stir. When William of Orange heard about it he had the bells rung in Antwerp, while at home ‘the courtiers’ minds were diversely affected; some leaped for joy, some were seized with admiration, and others were dejected with sorrow’.30 Camden goes on to say that the Queen quickly regretted her rash words and spent a sleepless night in ‘doubts and cares’ among the lamentations of her gentlewomen, but despite all appearances the Queen had, in fact, committed herself to very little. If the French took her up on her promise she had only to protest that she’d been misunderstood and raise her terms to even higher levels. (She was already demanding conditions which the King was expected to refuse.) Alternatively, she could call Parliament in the confident expectation of a Commons’ veto on her marriage to a Catholic. In either case she would be able to cast the blame for failure on other shoulders. It’s in the highest degree unlikely that she made her declaration unadvisedly – carried away ‘by the force of modest love in the midst of amorous discourse’. The Indian summer madness of 1579 had long since faded and now, at least so she told the Earl of Sussex in December, Elizabeth hated the idea of marriage more every day for reasons which she would not divulge to a twin soul.
That Alençon had taken her seriously, even for a moment, is almost equally unlikely. The Duke was nobody’s fool and had probably known for some time that the marriage was a non-starter. However, the Queen had now given him a useful card which he proceeded to play by sitting tight and indicating quite plainly that she would have to make it worth his while to go away quietly. And it’s difficult to blame him. Elizabeth had made shameless use of him and she owed him something. The poor Frog may also have been growing tired of his rootless, precarious gambler’s existence. It was pleasant to live comfortably and free at the English court, and the prospect of going back into the cold clearly became less and less inviting. Of all Elizabeth’s suitors it is possible to feel more than a little sorry for François, Duke of Alençon.
After some indecision and a good deal of haggling, Elizabeth finally offered him a ‘loan’ of £60,000 – half to be paid fifteen days after he had left the country and the other half fifty days after that. Still he would not go and showed signs of turning awkward, pointing out reasonably enough that the Queen had openly pledged herself to him and, if she turned him out now, he would become the laughing-stock of the world. The Queen advanced him £10,000 and still he lingered, hoping to extort better terms. At last, just as the situation threatened to become embarrassing, he had to accept the fact that the holidays were over and, after some last-minute delays, he left London on 1 February 1582. The Queen went with him as far as Canterbury and a rather sardonic Leicester was deputed to see him safely off the premises. The farewells were affectionate, Elizabeth protesting tearfully that she would give a million to have her dear Frog swimming in the Thames again and telling all and sundry that he would be back in six weeks to marry her – if only the King of France would keep his side of the bargain. In private she is said to have danced for joy in her bedchamber.
The Queen had reason to feel relief and some satisfaction. She had succeeded in extricating herself comparatively cheaply from a potentially dangerous predicament. There had been no rupture with France; Alençon might yet cause Philip some trouble in the Netherlands and Elizabeth had gained nearly three years’ valuable time. As it turned out, Alençon accomplished very little in the Netherlands – indeed, he was to prove more of a nuisance to the hard-pressed Dutch than to anyone else – and when he died of fever in June 1584 he had long outlived his usefulness to the Queen of England. Nevertheless, Elizabeth apparently mourned him deeply, shedding tears for three weeks on end and unblushingly informing the French ambassador that she regarded himself as a forlorn widow. Perhaps she did feel a mild pang. Beneath all the nonsense and the play-acting she had liked Alençon. He had been her last fling and at least he had amused her for a season.