The Spanish ambassador came to St James’s Palace in Westminster on 9 November 1558, a Wednesday, in time for dinner. Briefed by his master, his sacred Catholic royal majesty Philip, King of Spain and Jerusalem as well as King of England, the ambassador had set out from Arras on the 5th. After a brisk sea crossing to Dover he and his party set off for London with no time to waste. Their speed marked the urgency of the mission, which was a special and difficult one. King Philip’s wife, Queen Mary of England, the daughter of King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon, was dying. At issue were the English royal succession and the Tudor inheritance. Just as important to Philip was the now uncertain future of England’s relations with Spain and the other countries of Catholic Europe.
The king’s emissary was Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Count of Feria. He was thirty-eight years old, the captain of Philip’s guard, a close royal adviser and a man who used plain words. He said he was unsuited to the intricacies of diplomacy, knowing that he lacked the suaveness of a professional ambassador. But Philip trusted Feria. It was impossible for the king himself to travel to Westminster to visit his wife, for he was busy with the funeral obsequies of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and absorbed by peace negotiations with France. Philip had to know what was happening at Mary’s royal court, and Feria was to be his king’s eyes and ears in England, a task Philip knew the count would perform without a career diplomat’s evasions and circumlocutions.
As Feria drew up at St James’s in the cold of an English November, he must have wondered about the likely success of his mission. How sick was Queen Mary? What were the fears and preoccupations of her advisers? What, above all, were the intentions of Mary’s half-sister Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and the detested Anne Boleyn? Elizabeth was twenty-five years old and already deeply experienced in the ways of court politics. Four years before Feria’s embassy, in 1554, she had been implicated in an unsuccessful coup again Mary’s government. As a result Elizabeth had been sent to the Tower of London and was later held for a time under house arrest in Oxfordshire. Feria himself had met Elizabeth only once before, when he had been in England in 1554 and 1555 on Philip’s grand visit to Mary’s court. She was then, he remembered, pleasant and welcoming, though that of course was in her interest: she had been a princess under suspicion. Now, in November 1558, the remarkable fact was that the young woman known as the Lady Elizabeth’s grace was queen in waiting.
When Feria and his party arrived at St James’s he and the Portuguese physician travelling with him, Doctor Luis Núñez, went straight to see Mary. Throughout her reign her health had been poor, and, though court physicians did not know the precise nature of her disease (it may have been ovarian cancer), it was obvious to Núñez and even to Feria that she was mortally sick. Mary was conscious enough that Wednesday afternoon to recognize the count. She was pleased at his embassy. But when Feria produced a letter for Mary from her husband she was not able to read it for herself. It can hardly have been a cheering audience.
Feria knew that he had not a moment to lose; he felt sure that Mary would soon be dead. That same afternoon he met her Privy Council of advisers and officials. They were polite and proper in receiving so distinguished an ambassador but they were hardly effusive in welcoming him. ‘They have received me well,’ he wrote in a dispatch to Philip, ‘but somewhat as they would a man who came to them with bulls [edicts or commandments] from a dead pope.’ There was a tangible feeling at St James’s that Mary’s government, like the influence of Spain in the politics of England, was near to its end.
On Feria’s mind were two topics of critical importance. The first was the progress of Philip’s negotiations with the King of France for peace. England and Spain had fought together against France, and for England one profound consequence, earlier in the year, had been the military failure of losing to the enemy the town of Calais, ruled by England for two centuries and the Tudor crown’s last toehold on mainland Europe. The psychological effects of this bitter defeat were enormous, and it rocked the Anglo-Spanish dynastic alliance. Mary’s advisers blamed Spain for the loss of Calais, while the Spaniards put the disaster down to English military incompetence. Feria’s meeting with the Privy Council must have crackled with the powerful energies of anger, grievance and uncertainty. What Mary’s councillors feared was that King Philip would make a treaty with France without first agreeing the return to England of Calais by the French. In his meeting with the Council at St James’s, Feria was probably as emollient as he could be. Yet Calais was never given back to the Tudor crown, and the suspicion of a Spanish sell-out over the town soured relations between England and Philip for decades to come.
Anglo-Spanish peace with France was of course a subject of immense importance and complexity. But the most pressing business of all at St James’s Palace on 9 November 1558 was the English royal succession. The question was this: what would happen to the crown when Mary died? She was childless, and her lawful successor was her half-sister Elizabeth, whom Mary detested. It was reported that, in a vicious swipe at Elizabeth’s legitimacy, Mary said that she looked like Mark Smeaton, one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers: Elizabeth, in other words, was not even Henry VIII’s daughter. This was the charge of a double bastardy, for Queen Anne, after usurping the place of Mary’s mother Catherine of Aragon as the king’s wife, had gone to the executioner’s block for the treason of incestuous adultery.
For Mary and her supporters – and for politically minded English Catholics more generally – Elizabeth, as Anne Boleyn’s daughter, personified and symbolized the heresy and schism of Henry VIII’s divorce in 1533 and England’s break with the Church of Rome. So Mary had fought with all her power to keep Elizabeth off the throne, though significantly she had not changed the law of the royal succession, instead putting her faith in the sure hope and expectation that she would have a child to succeed her. By 1558 that hope was gone.
With a certain irony, it was the dead hand of their father that settled the matter for Mary and Elizabeth in October and November 1558. The key to everything was the Act of Succession of 1544. This statute is one of the most important documents in the history of sixteenth-century Europe, for it gave the force of law to those clauses of Henry VIII’s last will and testament that set out with great care exactly how the Tudor royal succession would proceed in practically every possible circumstance. In 1546, shortly before he died, Henry determined that if Mary died as queen without a legitimate heir, his youngest daughter Elizabeth would succeed her. In 1558 Mary’s privy councillors, knowing that she was very seriously ill, urgently petitioned her to accept Elizabeth’s claim to the throne. Mary did this on 28 October, only days before Feria’s arrival at St James’s, by adding a codicil to her will. Queen Mary left the ‘government, order and rule’ of the kingdom to her ‘next heir and successor, according to the laws and statutes of this realm’. She recognized that her ‘dear lord and husband’ Philip could no longer play any part in the government of England. Elizabeth’s actual name was nowhere mentioned. The distasteful thing was done by the time Feria was in Westminster. Facing an obvious fact, the count told Mary’s Privy Council that their king supported Elizabeth’s succession.
Of course there was really no choice: barring a remarkable upset, Elizabeth would be queen. Henry VIII’s law of succession stood. Parliament and the Privy Council were bound by the dead hand of Mary’s father. Mary’s advisers knew they were yesterday’s men. Some of them were plainly afraid of Elizabeth’s revenge for her time in prison. What Feria saw with his own eyes was a government crumbling away. He was quite as impotent, the emissary of the most powerful king in Europe who came to Westminster with grand words but could actually change nothing. Feria spoke to Mary’s men for his king – and their king too, yet a foreigner – who was trying to manage political change it was entirely beyond even his power to control. Philip was King of England by marriage only, and his own English ancestry, which went back to the house of Lancaster, was much too weak to make him a plausible claimant in his own right. For the time being Philip and Mary were still by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol. Theirs was a grand and impressive royal style that extended far beyond Westminster. It was the manifesto of European Catholic monarchy. But nothing lasts for ever.
The Count of Feria met Elizabeth Tudor, the young woman he knew in his bones would soon be queen, on Thursday, 10 November 1558, the day following his arrival at St James’s Palace. She was at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, twenty-five miles north of London, very near to her own estate of Hatfield. She had been at the hall since at least 28 October, the day she wrote to one of her supporters as ‘Your very loving friend Elizabeth’. In Hertfordshire she was surrounded by her ladies and gentlewomen. But for some time Elizabeth had also been recruiting a shadow government of mainly Protestant advisers – a fact to which Feria, deeply suspicious of those men he called heretics, was very alert.
Feria arrived at Brocket Hall in time for the midday meal of dinner with the future queen and her intimate servants. Like Mary’s Council, Elizabeth received him politely but without, as Feria could see, very much joy. The young woman he met that day must have been relieved beyond measure. The anxieties of Mary’s reign were lifting, though she did not know how easy her accession was likely to be. The fact that she was now so near to inheriting the throne of the Tudor kingdoms of England and Ireland was stunning, for her rule was never written in the stars. In fact, when Henry VIII wrote his will in 1546 it was wildly improbable that his younger daughter would ever be queen. But Edward VI, at fifteen years old, died in 1553, and after only five and a half years as queen Mary too was dying; both were childless. To Elizabeth it was an act of divine providence that the remote prospect she had of becoming queen was now practically a certainty. Feria saw the facts as they were. With diplomatic correctness he spoke to Princess Elizabeth at one point of Queen Mary’s recovery. But if he had had any hope of that, he would not have said to Elizabeth what he did that day, or have been so interested in her reactions and responses.
After a relaxed and lively dinner Elizabeth and Feria spoke privately, though he told her, to make an important point, that he preferred the whole kingdom to hear what he had to say. Always guarded in her words, the princess made sure that the two or three ladies who attended her spoke only English. Feria and Elizabeth probably talked in Italian, though whatever language they used allowed them to have a long discussion. For a woman skilled in hiding her emotions, Elizabeth spoke to Feria with at times startling frankness. On behalf of Philip the count tried to befriend Elizabeth. Sharp and, young as she was, well practised in the arts and dangers of court politics, Elizabeth Tudor knew precisely what Feria was up to.
The count gave Elizabeth a letter from Philip of Spain which the king had written with own hand as a mark of his friendship to the princess. Feria guided Elizabeth through each point Philip made in the letter, just as he had been instructed to do by his master in Arras. The princess was polite. She said she was grateful to Philip for his letter, and that he could be assured she would maintain the good relations that had long existed between Spain and England. Elizabeth told Feria that when she had gone to prison in Mary’s reign Philip had helped to secure her freedom. She felt it was not dishonourable to admit that she had once been a prisoner: she believed that the dishonour belonged to those who had put her there; she had been innocent after all. Feria told Elizabeth that she should always consider the king her true brother.
Elizabeth talked much more openly to Feria than he expected her to. He noted one thing above all others: she was very clever. Less flatteringly he said she was also very vain. In a later report to Philip the count wrote that he thought her well schooled in the ways of Henry VIII. This was a warning as much as a compliment. Feria saw that Elizabeth would take as her advisers men suspected of heresy, that is, men who professed the Protestant faith; the count had been told that all the women around the princess certainly were heretics. He was troubled about the future of Catholic England. In what must have been a delicate exchange, Feria told Elizabeth that everyone expected her to be a good Catholic princess. If she abandoned the faith, he said, both God and man would abandon her.
It was obvious to Feria that Elizabeth was very angry indeed at the way she had been treated in Mary’s reign: suspected of complicity with rebels, sent to the great fortress and prison of the Tower of London, interrogated and later put under house arrest. To Feria she spoke strong words against senior men in Mary’s government. He tried to calm Elizabeth’s anger and said that for her own good and for the kingdom’s she should not desire revenge against anyone. She replied that all she wanted to do was to make those councillors admit that they had wronged her, and then she would pardon them. More worrying for Feria and Philip was Elizabeth’s belief that she owed her imminent succession to the ordinary English people and not to the nobility, and certainly not to her brother the King of Spain. Feria saw that she had great confidence in her popularity, and also that she was determined to be governed by no one.
Feria explained to Elizabeth that Philip had ordered all those Englishmen whose pensions he paid to serve her when the need arose. She wanted to know who these pensioners were. She answered Feria sharply: he was taken aback and, though he pretended not to catch it, her meaning was clear to him: she wanted to be able to decide whether it was right for her subjects to take money from the King of Spain. Already she was jealous of her sovereignty and proud of her independence. Not surprisingly Feria talked to Elizabeth, as he had spoken to Mary’s Council the afternoon before, of the peace negotiations with France. Elizabeth, too, was stung by the humiliation of losing Calais; after all, the Tudor monarchs styled themselves as Kings and Queens of France, remembering the heroic conquests of their Lancastrian ancestor King Henry V in the fifteenth century. How different it all looked over a hundred years later. Elizabeth told Feria frankly that if the English commissioners at the peace conference about to meet in Brussels made an agreement without Calais she would have them beheaded.
The conversation moved to the subject of her marriage. Elizabeth told Feria that Philip had tried very hard to encourage Mary to arrange a marriage for her to Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, and at Brocket Hall that afternoon she smiled at the memory of it. Feria replied that Philip had only ever tried to persuade Mary to accept Elizabeth as her sister and successor. The king had never dreamed of concluding anything without her consent. Elizabeth said in reply, and none too subtly, that Mary had lost the affection of her people because she had married a foreigner. Feria replied lamely that Philip had been well loved in England.
As Feria left Brocket Hall, he told Elizabeth that he would see her again soon, whether Mary lived or died. If the queen should die he wanted to know what the princess wished him to do. He was minded to visit her. She told him not to do that, but rather to wait till she sent instructions. The English, Elizabeth said with a dash of malicious irony, were resentful of her own partiality for foreigners. That, Feria agreed, was true enough.
Feria tried to make sense of what he had seen and heard so far in his embassy to England. It seemed to the count that King Philip had no influence at all. If Elizabeth had been married off to a safe foreign prince, the situation might have been different. But as matters stood in November 1558 it was plain to Feria that she would marry whomever she pleased, with who knew what dynastic consequences. She would be able to put herself beyond the control of either the Spanish or French ruling families, the Habsburgs or the Valois. Feria was sure that Elizabeth saw herself as the next Queen of England. She believed that she would succeed Mary even if Mary and Philip opposed her succession, which, given Mary’s unhappy acquiescence to succession law and the message of Feria’s embassy, seemed unlikely. ‘God alone knows,’ Feria wrote, ‘how it pains me to see what is happening here.’ He felt wretched and asked Philip to send to London an ambassador better able to cope with business of such sensitivity and complexity. The only thing that improved his mood was the nervous manner of poor humble Doctor Núñez. ‘He is my salvation,’ Feria wrote, ‘for I find myself having to put up with such annoyances and I am so frequently snubbed here, that it consoles me whenever I see him enter my presence so meek and fearful of what might happen to him.’
Feria believed that there were two things Princess Elizabeth seemed disposed to do as queen. The first was to conclude a peace with France. The second was to maintain good relations with both Spain and France. Feria had noted the names of men he thought likely to have influence in the new government. He suspected many close to Elizabeth to be Protestants. Of one piece of intelligence Feria was certain: it was that Elizabeth’s secretary, the man who would run the government machine and be her right hand, was Sir William Cecil, thirty-eight years old, educated at Cambridge University and formerly secretary to King Edward VI. Of Cecil, whom he did not know, Feria wrote: ‘éste dizen que es hombre entendido y virtuoso pero erege’. He was an able and virtuous man but a heretic.
On Monday, 14 November, four days after visiting Elizabeth at Brocket Hall, Feria wrote to King Philip. He was blunt. There was no hope for Mary’s life; indeed with the passing of each hour he expected news of her death. He wrote his diplomatic dispatch with a grim resignation. The night before he set to work on it, on the evening of the 13th, Mary, the queen who had returned her Tudor kingdoms so decisively to the universal Catholic Church after the schism and heresy of Henry VIII and Edward VI, received the sacrament of extreme unction, anointed with holy oil in her last illness. ‘Today she is better,’ Feria wrote to Philip on the 14th, ‘although there is little hope of her life.’
Feria worked hard on his dispatch to Philip, putting some of its more sensitive passages into cipher. He must have been glad to finish it, for he felt oppressed by his embassy, vital as it was. Snubbed at the court of a dying queen, dispirited and beset by business so complicated he felt overwhelmed by it, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Count of Feria was surely relieved to hand the sealed packet to the courier. The dispatch rider had it by two o’clock and rode off with it to Dover.
On Thursday, 17 November 1558 Sir William Cecil was the busiest man in England, hard at work putting Elizabeth’s government together and winding up the affairs of the old court. He wrote paper after paper, long complicated lists of items of business to get through for a peaceful and smooth succession. Queen Mary had died at six o’clock that morning. Sir William, with the anticipation of a skilled royal servant and politician, was already at Hatfield with Queen Elizabeth. While noblemen and gentlemen came to seek audience with Elizabeth at her court, still Sir William Cecil continued to write. There was little relief, but he was quite equal to it. For three years he had been secretary to King Edward VI, and for three years before that he had served in the household of the most powerful man in England, young Edward VI’s protector and governor, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Duke of Somerset, Henry VIII’s brother-in-law. In Mary’s reign Cecil had cultivated good relations with important men at court. But he had also been careful to stay as close as he sensibly could to Princess Elizabeth, a young woman under suspicion, acting officially as the surveyor of her lands and estates. He had known Elizabeth for many years; and in the early spring of 1558 they had met on a visit she made to Westminster when very probably they had spoken about the office Cecil would soon have in Elizabeth’s government.
On 17 November the Count of Feria was still in London. Three days earlier he had written his dispatch to King Philip. In fact it was only a week since he and Elizabeth had talked at Brocket Hall. But now with Mary’s death at St James’s Palace power had shifted absolutely, and God’s anointed resided for the time being in Hertfordshire: the queen was dead, long live the queen. Sir William Cecil set out the business of the new reign, including the dispatch of special messengers informing the Pope and the powers of the Empire, Spain, Denmark and Venice of Elizabeth’s accession. It seemed unlikely that the Count of Feria would be called to Hatfield for an audience with the young queen: she had made that as plain as was polite a week before.
The proclamation of the accession of Elizabeth, ‘by the grace of God Queen of England, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, etc.’, was read out in Westminster and London within hours of Mary’s death. Cecil must have worked on it with remarkable speed; very likely he had the text ready for when it was needed. At the great cross at Cheapside in the city of London officials, accompanied by heralds and trumpets, made the proclamation between eleven o’clock and noon. On the following day Sir William wrote, with his usual brisk economy, ‘done, to Jugge’, by whom he meant Richard Jugge, the newly appointed royal printer, busy in his workshop near St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Five hundred copies of the proclamation came off Jugge’s press at the very modest cost to the new government of twenty-two shillings and sixpence. Within weeks, every corner of England, Wales and Ireland would know that Elizabeth was queen.
Cecil and many of Elizabeth’s other close advisers were veterans of the debacle of 1553, when in defiance of the law Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth had been put aside from the royal succession in favour of a young married Protestant kinswoman, Lady Jane Grey, chosen by Edward VI in his last fatal illness. That effort had failed. Shutting itself away in the Tower, Jane’s Privy Council had never imagined that Mary would gather an army to march on London. But she did, and the Council – paralysed by both Mary’s resolution and the knowledge that every adviser to the pretender queen had committed treason by disregarding Henry VIII’s succession law – collapsed. So the circumstances of Elizabeth’s accession were nothing like those of 1553. But still the new government must have been at least a little nervous. The first proclamation was specially composed to sound both dignified and authoritative, to set out the plain facts of Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s accession, as well as to emphasize the need for peace and order. The new queen made a public formal record of her ‘great grief’ at the death of her ‘dearest sister of noble memory’. Mary had chosen to ‘dispose and bestow’ the crown upon Elizabeth as her only rightful heir by blood and lawful succession. Subjects were discharged of all their old bonds and obligations, now owing obedience only to Elizabeth; she promised in return ‘no less love and care towards their preservation’. Few words were wasted: from beginning to end the proclamation would have taken a public official a little short of three minutes to read out loud. Richard Jugge’s single printed sheet ended with words that must have been shouted by men and women who could only imagine what the future held for Elizabeth, her people and the kingdom: ‘God save the Queen.’
Where in this great whirl of activity was Elizabeth herself? Strangely, she is the one person hidden from easy view: perhaps already she was cloaked by the powerful mystique of Tudor monarchy. Little was recorded of her in those first hours and days of rule. But some of her words have survived, to Sir William Cecil as her secretary, as well as to those noblemen who had come to her at Hatfield. To Cecil she spoke of her trust and his faithfulness to her and to ‘the state’, a phrase that would take on a concrete meaning in the coming forty years. To her lords she spoke of a natural sorrow for Mary, and of her amazement at what she called the burden of her office. She understood this royal burden to be God’s will.
Like the Count of Feria in conversation with Elizabeth at Brocket Hall a few days before she became queen, we begin to make sense of her. Feria noted her intelligence, and her vanity too. She seemed to be independent, even wilful. Feria thought that she would refuse to be ruled by anyone. She had smiled at the thought of being married off for the sake of international political convenience; she had laughed when she wanted to and was plain, even sharp, when she had to be; she was able to leave matters unspoken. Now she was queen, Elizabeth drew her authority, not from her father or the law, but directly from God. She was God’s representative on earth; her power was blessed by heaven; she was a woman touched by the divine.
Throughout her life the fact of Elizabeth’s royalty had always a sharp edge to it. As a girl she had been thrown aside as a bastard when her brother Prince Edward was born, inserted once again into the English royal succession a few years later (though still by law illegitimate) and in Mary’s reign imprisoned. There is a suspicion that at least one of Queen Mary’s close advisers had counselled Elizabeth’s assassination, a notion that, given contemporary thinking on the elimination of dynastic rivals, is not far-fetched. As Elizabeth once said: ‘I know what it is to be a subject, what to be a sovereign, what to have good neighbours, and sometime meet evil willers. I have found treason in trust.’ She was not sentimental, but instead resolute in defending the boundaries of her royal authority. If divine providence had seen fit to hand her the crown, then it was her duty, and that of her advisers and servants, to keep it firmly in place upon her head. She had to be kept alive whatever the cost, protected against her enemies: her kingdom and people, as well as the will of God, depended upon it. That, shown in the work of spies and informants and the government’s policy of security against those it perceived to be its bitter enemies, is one of the major themes of this book.
Queen Elizabeth shared her royal office with no one else. She was counselled, yet kept her own counsel. When she spoke, often reluctantly and in times of political urgency, it was with the weariness of action, of someone forced just a little into the open. In some ways the character of Elizabeth has about it a spy’s elusive quality; she was practised at self-protection. Often she was in the shadows: in the privacy of her private chambers or walking in her gardens, briefed by her advisers, acting through her ministers, or even watched by potential assassins. She was more often offstage than on it but present nevertheless as the source of her officials’ power, the object of their efforts at fighting the enemy.
Two competing forces produced within Elizabeth a fascinating tension. As a ruler she spoke insistently about her authority. But as a woman in a world of politics dominated by men she had to build a protective barrier between herself and those who wished her to follow policies she did not want to pursue. She was incisive, sharp and clever; she was also deliberately vague and imprecise; and she used in political life the great weapon of delay. Elizabeth was a controlled paradox, skilled rhetorically at using many fine words to say almost nothing at all, to dizzy and confuse her hearers. Even at her simplest she keeps us on our toes. It is recorded that in Mary’s reign Elizabeth scratched into a window at Woodstock, where she was being held under house arrest, the lines
Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be.
Quod [said] Elizabeth the prisoner
Ten years later, as queen, she wrote for a courtier:
No crooked leg, no blearèd eye,
No part deformèd out of kind,
Nor yet so ugly half can be
As is the inward, suspicious mind.
Elizabeth refused to be held to one position, for she was aware like no one else around her of the curious vulnerability of God’s anointed.
So here were the first hours of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of the long fight for the integrity and survival of the Elizabethan state. But nothing was yet certain. To the Count of Feria, Elizabeth was clever, vain and minded to do as suited herself. She had no obligations to the powers and principalities of Europe and no obvious commitments, other than the return to Tudor rule of the town of Calais and the vague promise of friendship with Philip of Spain. The first never happened, the second quickly dissolved away. The young queen was possibly a heretic; certainly some of her courtiers and councillors were. So much was unknown. Philip could only begin to make his political and diplomatic calculations. He, like everyone else, would have to wait for Elizabeth and her advisers properly to reveal themselves.
But Elizabethans faced their own struggles. So far as anyone knew in November 1558 Elizabeth’s reign was no more permanent than her brother’s or her sister’s. Elizabeth trusted in God’s providence, but she came to the throne after a bitter and disastrous war and in a time of severe economic strain and virulent sickness. The only useful thing to come of the widespread fever of 1558 was its efficiency in killing off some prominent members of Mary’s government who could have caused Elizabeth serious political inconvenience. If Elizabeth and her advisers wanted to break once more with the Church of Rome, as Henry VIII had done a quarter of a century earlier, they faced a fierce political and legal struggle. In the reign of Edward VI the English people had worshipped according to Protestant prayer books. They would soon do so again. International peace was about to return to Europe. But what kind of peace would it be, and how far could the new English government trust Spain, France and the papacy?
Elizabeth and her advisers knew that they would have to fight for England’s security. The survival of the Tudor monarchy could not be assumed. Quite apart from the fact that it depended only upon the life of one woman – a fragile thing in the sixteenth century – there were at least two other significant factors. The first was Spain. True, his sacred Catholic royal majesty King Philip at first gave friendly guidance to Elizabeth. He even reluctantly offered her marriage; she politely but firmly declined it. But Philip, who at the age of thirty-one already prided himself upon his tactical acuity, would always put the interests of Spain first.
The second factor was the most important of the two. Elizabeth was not in 1558 the only plausible candidate to the English throne. She had a blood kinswoman, the daughter of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise of France, and the wife of the French dauphin, Francis, of the royal house of Valois. This young woman’s uncles of the house of Guise were some of the most powerful men in Europe. Through her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, she was the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII of England. By his last will and testament, confirmed by an act of parliament, Henry VIII had ignored the claim to the English throne of Mary’s family, the Stuarts of Scotland. But no one could dispute the fact that she had Tudor blood.
So Mary Stuart, a Catholic, was a credible royal counter-claimant to a Protestant and, in Catholic eyes, an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Significantly, Henry’s Succession Act of 1544 had confirmed Elizabeth’s place in the royal succession but it did not restore to her the legitimacy of birth that had been stripped away when Prince Edward was born. That was only done by Elizabeth’s first parliament in 1559. Her enemies quickly grasped the point: she was a bastard. Predictably, Elizabeth’s advisers were outraged to discover within months of her accession that the dinnerware of Mary and Francis of France was stamped with the royal arms of England. Very tall with hazel eyes, auburn hair and a fair complexion, the great-niece of Henry VIII, kinswoman of Elizabeth Tudor, and dauphine of France, Mary Stuart was in November 1558 a month away from her eighteenth birthday. Before everything else she was Regina Scotorum, Queen of Scots rather than Queen of Scotland, using the traditional style of the rulers of Scotland from the twelfth century. But she wanted to be Queen of England too.
This was the broad landscape of Elizabeth’s reign. Its contours were formed by the balance of military power in Europe, the clash of religious faiths and the collisions of royal dynasty. Elizabeth, a queen blessed by God’s providence who wanted to follow her own path, faced the seemingly immovable object of Spanish power and the fact of Mary Stuart’s claim to her throne. No one in 1558, least of all Elizabeth and her advisers, knew how these forces would act upon the politics of Elizabeth’s reign, or indeed how long her reign would – or even could – survive.