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The Early Years

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is a hind

But as for me, alas, I may no more.

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

I am of those that farthest come behind.

Yet may by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,

Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who lists her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I may spend his time in vain;

And graven with diamonds, in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about,

Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

The pursuit of Elizabeth Tudor was the greatest hunt in history. For more than half a century, kings, princes, nobles, and knights, Frenchmen, Austrians, Spaniards, Swedes, and “mere English” joined the chase, lured by the magnificent quarry who pranced before them, leaping away, doubling back, sometimes halting and seeming to yield, but always at last disappearing over the horizon. Instinct and experience taught Elizabeth not to surrender, but political expediency, emotional cravings, and the exhilaration of the sport combined in her head and heart to keep the great hunt going. From her babyhood into her old age, in spite of her avowals of perpetual virginity, in spite of rich rumors to the contrary, the most splendid men in Europe succeeded one another in the field as suitors to the queen.

Noli me tangere—do not touch me; it would have been a fitting motto for Elizabeth, but she was not born when Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote the sonnet, bitter with love for her mother, Anne Boleyn. Giddy, seductive Anne had no need of lesser lovers such as Wyatt while Henry VIII, England’s mighty Caesar, courted her with exuberant tenderness, drawing hearts and initials on his love letters like a schoolboy, disrupting the religious and social orders to make her his wife. She was not a classic beauty, but she had the luscious dark eyes and nervy delicacy of a doe, and she dressed with sophisticated, expensive taste; above all, she knew how to make men ache with desire. Women in the London crowds shouted abuse at her and the imperial ambassador Chapuys sneered knowingly and referred to her as “the Concubine” in his dispatches. After the birth of Elizabeth, in September 1533, he wrote, “The christening has been like her mother’s coronation, very cold and disagreeable both to the court and to the city.” It was a serious blow to Henry VIII that the baby, born seven months after his marriage to Anne, was not a boy; however, the new queen’s ability to bear children was now proved, and the all-important male heir to the throne would no doubt follow. The baby Elizabeth was healthy and indeed had a certain value as bait for a future foreign marriage alliance. But the king’s passion for his wife faded as the months paced on and no son was born. Anne’s brittle charm cracked into neurosis, her peals of inappropriate laughter sounded hysterical, her shrewishness vented itself in orders to threaten and bully the king’s disgraced elder daughter, Mary. More than ever Anne seemed “wild for to hold,” carelessly coquettish with any man from the common musician Mark Smeaton to her own brother Viscount Rochford, flirting and teasing and fishing for compliments, seeking reassurance that she was still desirable. Then, in January 1536, she gave birth prematurely to a stillborn boy, and Henry had no more tolerance.

Noli me tangere . . . the lascivious incitements by which she roused her lovers included “touchings,” it was stated at her trial. The bald obscenity of the official reports had nothing in common with Wyatt’s courtly erotic yearnings, or the king’s boisterous love letters. The world heard from Westminster that the queen had “procured and incited her own natural brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to violate and carnally know her, with her tongue in the said George’s mouth, and the said George’s tongue in hers, and also with open-mouthed kisses, gifts and jewels.” Five men altogether were condemned to death as her lovers. Anne was judged guilty of carnal adulterous lusts, of despising God’s commands and human laws, and Chapuys informed his emperor that “she was also charged, and her brother likewise, with having laughed at the King and his dress.”

The mocked king made no secret of his joy at the condemnation of his wife that released him from her. “Already it sounds ill in the ears of the people,” Chapuys reported with interest, “that the King, having received such ignominy, has shown himself more glad than ever since the arrest of the whore, for he has been going about banqueting with ladies, sometimes remaining after midnight, and returning by the river.” Seven miles up the river Thames, prim, pretty Jane Seymour was lodged in state. Down the river, below London Bridge with its crammed houses and shops, lay the dark bulk of the Tower, where Anne Boleyn was waiting to die. The constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, reported with surprise that she was “very merry”; she kept laughing, he wrote, and once she joked, “I heard say the executor was very good, and I have a little neck,” and then she “put her hand about it, laughing heartily.” She was beheaded on Tower Green on May 19, not laughing, but looking “exhausted and amazed.”

Among the bills left unpaid at Anne Boleyn’s death were listed expensive items for her little daughter—caps of satin and taffeta; satin and crimson fringe for the child’s cradle. Elizabeth was nearly three when her mother was condemned to death by her father. She had been taken from the queen shortly after her birth, and a royal nursery had been established, first at the old wooded manor of Hatfield, then at stately Eltham Palace, and later at Hunsdon, in Hertfordshire, but despite the official separation she had seen her parents often during her babyhood. For the first two years of her life Elizabeth was the heir presumptive to the English throne, Henry’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary, by his divorced wife, Catherine of Aragon, having been declared a bastard. There seemed little prospect that Elizabeth would actually inherit, for the king was in his lusty prime, and would surely beget sons to supersede her, but in the meantime she was the “High and Mighty Princess of England,” and both Henry and Anne were proud and fond of her. Two years before he was called upon to act as royal jailer, Sir William Kingston had written enthusiastically, “Today the King and Queen were at Eltham, and saw my Lady Princess—as goodly a child as has been seen. Her Grace is much in the King’s favor, as goodly child should be, God save her.” In January 1536, only five months before Anne’s disgrace, Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court to take part in the king’s unbridled rejoicings at the death of his scorned and repudiated former wife, Catherine of Aragon. The little princess was paraded to Mass to the tingling blast of trumpets “and other great triumphs,” and late that evening the king, dressed from head to foot in yellow, except for the white feather in his cap, sent for his daughter and then swung her up in his huge arms and carried her about, boisterously showing her off to the company. By May, however, his elation had evaporated. It was claimed, years later, that just before Anne’s arrest he had been seen at a window of Greenwich Palace, staring frozenly out into the courtyard below, while Anne stood weeping beside him apparently pleading with him, holding Elizabeth out to him beseechingly. Such vivid, disturbing scenes outside the familiar nursery world would surely remain in a child’s uncomprehending memory, to sink into the layer of impressions with which the subconscious mind is lined.

Incidents remembered, servants’ whispers, awkward answers to casual prattled questions—there were many ways in which Elizabeth would have absorbed information. No doubt efforts were made to protect her from the disturbing knowledge of her mother’s shocking death, but in a large household consisting almost entirely of servants, with a fond governess—Lady Bryan—who was a cousin of the late queen, it is not likely that the child remained for long in total ignorance of the event. It might have seemed as unreal as a fairy story, as personally unrelated as tales of Robin Goodfellow or King Arthur’s knights, had the drama not been constantly repeated with living protagonists throughout Elizabeth’s childhood, becoming the reality of her own experience. In each of her father’s subsequent marriages—Elizabeth was a veteran of five marriages by the time she was ten years old—the same picture was embellished, fresh layers of paint laid on the sketch of her own earliest impressions. The king, her mighty royal father, the image of towering masculinity, possessed utter power over each vulnerable, disposable wife who bound herself to him in wedlock.

The effects of the downfall and disposal of Anne Boleyn were soon felt at the nursery household of Hunsdon. “The very evening the Concubine was brought to the Tower,” Chapuys wrote, “when the Duke of Richmond went to say good night to his father, and ask his blessing after the English custom, the King began to weep, saying that he and his sister, meaning the Princess [Mary] were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them.” Before the adulteress, whore, and poisoner Anne was beheaded, her marriage with the king was annulled, so by the time he married Jane Seymour, at the end of May, Henry had three illegitimate children—his beloved son, the Duke of Richmond, by his mistress Bessie Blount; Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, the bastardized Mary; and little Elizabeth, whose governess, Lady Bryan, was soon distracted with worry at the poverty and confusion to which her household was reduced. “My Lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is of now, I know not but by hearsay,” she wrote, pleading with the king’s minister Thomas Cromwell to intercede. When the royal visits ceased, so did the presents of clothes and nursery-stuff; Elizabeth had grown out of all her dresses, caps, and underclothes, and Lady Bryan had to beg Cromwell to arrange “that she may have some raiment,” ending her heartfelt plea with the touching revelation that Elizabeth was having pain with her milk teeth coming through, and therefore they were spoiling her a little, but she added, “I trust to God an’ her teeth were well graft, to have Her Grace after another fashion than she is yet: so as I trust the King’s Grace shall have great comfort in Her Grace. For she is as toward a child, and as gentle of conditions, as ever I knew any in my life.”

The royal neglect was remedied, and the former heir presumptive took her official place as the king’s younger daughter. Yet she and her grown-up sister, Mary, remained legally bastards, and with the death of the king’s only male offspring, the Duke of Richmond, in July 1536, the succession question became more dangerously uncertain than ever. There were still many Englishmen who could remember the Wars of the Roses, the struggle for supremacy between the Houses of Lancaster and York, which had ended when the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, laid firm hands on the crown at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and nursed the limping country to new strength and wealth. His son Henry VIII had built a magnificently showy structure on firm foundations; under him England’s court became one of the finest in Europe. In the words of his own famous song, Henry VIII loved “pastime and good company,” gambling and dancing, and, above all, hunting—he was reported to have worn out eight good horses in a single day’s chase—and in a space of three years he managed to spend £3,300 on “cards, dice, tennis and wagers,” in addition to £11,000 that he paid out for jewelry during the same period. At times Henry’s personality seemed to be the lookingglass of the Renaissance; he possessed both intelligence and charm, and Erasmus wrote of him warmly, “He is a man of great friendliness, and gentle in debate; he acts more like a companion than a king,” but the robes and regalia of absolute power could not fail to muffle and distort the informal humanity in man or woman. As a private individual, a “Squire Harry,” Henry would surely have lived his life in tolerable harmony with his pious foreign wife, Catherine, and his conscientious daughter Mary, regretful, perhaps, that he had no son, but obliged to be content with his studies, his music, his mistresses, and his sport. But as the king, God’s anointed representative, with England, Ireland, Wales, and a slice of France for his estate, with some four million men, women, and children for his dependents, his responsibility was not to accept but to effect, and the future of the great nation that two generations of Tudors had cultivated and guarded was in jeopardy until the next Tudor prince should be born and the succession established beyond dispute.

After a quarter of a century of striving, Henry was at last presented with a healthy, legitimate, male heir. On October 12, 1537, eighteen months after the execution of Anne Boleyn, his third queen, Jane Seymour, gave birth to a boy at Hampton Court, and London went wild with joy. There were bonfires and banquets in the streets, hogsheads of free wine were set out in the city, more than two thousand guns pounded out a salute from the Tower, and there were “all the bells ringing in every parish church till it was ten at the clock at night.” The baby prince, “the whole realm’s most precious jewel,” was christened Edward in the chapel of Hampton Court. Elizabeth, as the king’s daughter, played an official part in the ceremony, carrying the richly ornamented chrisom cloth. Being only four years old, however, she herself had to be carried during the proceedings by the prince’s senior uncle, Edward Seymour.

When the customary New Year’s gifts were presented to Prince Edward on January 1, 1538, Henry VIII gave his infant heir sumptuous possessions, including “a basin all gilt, with a rose in the bottom with the King’s Grace’s arms in the rose,” “a ewer all gilt,” and a “standing cup with a cover, gilt, wrought with antique work,” while the Lady Mary chose for the child “a coat of crimson satin embroidered with gold, with tinsel sleeves and gold aiglettes.” The Lady Elizabeth, age five, gave the baby a little cambric shirt that she had laboriously sewed herself. If, as would seem likely, the arrival of a baby brother, and her own part in his christening, had prompted Elizabeth to ask a child’s timeless questions about the origins of babies and functions of mothers, the death of Jane Seymour only six days after the birth, when the events were fresh in Elizabeth’s mind, would have added another note to the discordant scale of impressions that included her own mother’s death.

At six years old, when, according to Wriothesley, she already behaved in public with as much gravity as if she were forty, she was presented with another stepmother, the German Protestant Anne of Cleves, but to the court’s bawdy amusement this Anne was so unappetizing that the king proved unable to consummate the marriage, and by the following summer she had been smoothly divorced, bought off with two manors, hangings, plate, fine dresses, a handsome allowance, and the title of “the King’s beloved sister,” and in her place sat the ravishing young noblewoman Catherine Howard. Sweetly promiscuous, she had been seduced at thirteen and lived in blithe immorality ever since, but at first Henry was too blind with ardor for his nubile “rose without a thorn” to see the rot beneath the petals. In the autumn of his life he had found again the bliss of springtime sexuality. Catherine was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and she accordingly made much of Elizabeth, giving her a prominent place at her wedding banquet. A little dizzy with the wines and rich foods, the raucous harmonies of shawms and sackbuts, and the smell of hot noisy people in sweaty satin, Elizabeth must have sat in the lofty, crowded banqueting hall of Hampton Court watching curiously as her vast and glorious father greedily fondled her girlish new stepmother. “The King caresses her more than he did the others,” Chapuys noted. By Christmas 1541, however, the king had awoken from his dream. With fury and misery he learned that his delicious young wife, by whom he could surely have given the nation an infant Duke of York, was no better than a trull, that she had been the paramour of a music master before her illustrious marriage, and had then committed adultery with a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. “Yt maketh my harte to dye to thynck what Fortune I have that I cannot be always in your companye,” she had written to her lover, Thomas Culpeper, and added naively that she found writing a very difficult business.

The vague tale of Anne Boleyn’s death now leapt into lurid life for the eight-year-old Elizabeth as the court and the country buzzed with interest at the scandal and shocking death of her pretty cousin. On February 12, 1542, Catherine was beheaded, as Elizabeth’s mother had been, on Tower Green, and her headless body buried near that of Anne Boleyn, under the flagstones of the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, in the Tower.

By the time she was ten years old Elizabeth had had four stepmothers. The installation of a sensible, kind, and intelligent woman as the last of Henry’s wives, in July 1543, came too late to eradicate the imprints of Elizabeth’s childhood experiences, but the new stepmother skillfully brought a semblance of affectionate unity to the king’s buffeted family. Lady Latimer, born Catherine Parr, had been twice widowed, but she was still an attractive little woman in her early thirties. A contemporary chronicler recorded that she was “quieter than any of the young wives the King had had, and as she knew more of the world she always got on pleasantly with the King, and had no caprices, and paid much honor to Madam Mary and the wives of the nobles.” Mary, now twenty-seven, devoutly Catholic, was still unmarried, and since the traumatic time when her own beloved mother’s marriage with the king had been pronounced null and she herself declared a bastard, she had been passionately sensitive where her status was concerned. The wanton Catherine Howard, ten years Mary’s junior, had slighted her, and the new queen’s tactful respect for her rank and blood was accordingly welcome. For the pale precocious scholarling Edward, Catherine became a “dearest mother,” and to Elizabeth, who spent much of 1544 away from the court, she showed “care and solicitude.” In public duty as well as in personal relationships Catherine was thoroughly competent; soon after her marriage she efficiently acted as regent while Henry, in temporary amity with Charles V of Spain, was across the Channel commanding the English army in a combined endeavor against the French. The letters between them at this period have the flavor of comfortable domestic affection—“No more to you at this time, sweetheart,” the king concluded his communication of September 8, 1544, “saving we pray you to give in our name our hearty blessings to all our children.”

In Catherine Parr, Elizabeth had a fine example of contemporary womanhood: educated, talented, poised, but ultimately submissive to the opinions and authority of her husband. It was fulsomely said of Elizabeth that, when she was six years old, her knowledge was sufficient to make her a credit to her father even if her education were to progress no further. Schooled according to the standards of the Renaissance, which the blaze of New Learning in Italy had ignited throughout Europe, she eagerly studied languages, the classics, and philosophy—“liberal sciences” and “moral learning”—with music for recreation, and by the age of ten she was an accomplished scholar of French and Italian. “Her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man,” her tutor Roger Ascham was later to report—high praise, to compare a young woman’s talents with the superior capabilities of a man. Education could equip a woman to be the intellectual companion of her husband, but as Catherine Parr found, any dispute with him had to be undertaken with cautious meekness; there was no counteracting the natural frailty and inferiority of woman. Husband of one highly educated woman, father of two more, Henry could tersely refuse to permit the Countess of Surrey to join her husband in France in 1545 on the grounds that the situation there was “unmeet for women’s imbecilities.” At the beginning of that year the eleven-year-old Elizabeth’s New Year’s gift to Catherine Parr had been a laborious translation of Margaret of Navarre’s mystical work Le Miroir de l’Ame Pécheresse, bound in a cover that she had embroidered herself, and accompanied by a tortuously sententious letter. It was early proof that Elizabeth, like Catherine, included scholarship among the womanly adornments that she could offer a husband.

It was not for her personal talents and virtues, however, but for impersonal political gain that the younger daughter of the King of England was sought in marriage from her very earliest years. Before she could even speak English coherently she had been courted as a wife, in an elaborate negotiation that both parties exploited to the full and then abandoned, as though in miniature rehearsal for the courtships of the adult queen. In 1535, when Elizabeth was not yet two years old, it was proposed that she should be betrothed to the Duke of Angoulême, the youngest son of Henry’s friend and rival, King Francis I of France. At that time Anne Boleyn was still Henry’s “own sweetheart,” and Elizabeth was England’s heir presumptive, only just weaned, but the most desirable bride in Europe. Chapuys commented that the king had apparently despaired of begetting sons, and concluded, with ironic accuracy, that “this last daughter may be mistress of England.” One condition of the contract was that the young suitor should be brought over to England and educated in English ways at court. Charles of Angoulême was nearly fourteen, a swaggering, high-spirited boy with blue eyes and fair hair, whom Francis loved far more than his older sons, the cold-natured dauphin and the stolid Duke of Orléans. “He had the favor of his father and the people, child of Fortune,” but he was also highly unstable, liable when drunk to go brawling in the streets of Paris, and at a very early age he took an older woman of the court as his mistress. And it was said that he seemed to be uncertain whether he was a girl or a boy; it was fortunate that Elizabeth, who as an adult liked men to appear aggressively virile, and was scornful of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, for falling in love with the “lady-faced” lad Darnley, was not tied in infancy to such a husband.

Chapuys and his fellow envoy at the English court, the Bishop of Faenza, watched the progress of the affair keenly. So close a link between France and England would be detrimental to the power and political maneuverability of the empire; it was a prime condition of the negotiations that neither Francis nor Henry should afterwards treat with the emperor Charles V. On April 5 Chapuys was maintaining loftily, “I do not attach much credit to it,” but by the end of that month the Bishop of Faenza had come to the conclusion that the betrothal would indeed take place. Then Chapuys reported a reassuring conversation he had had with Thomas Cromwell, during which the king’s minister had confided that he “felt almost assured that nothing would be concluded at all, skilful as the French were, who asked of them their daughter for the Duke of Angoulême in order to make their profit of them while she was under age, and when they thought expedient, to break all agreements—which never could last long with them, both by reason of their natural fickleness and because the French support the Church of Rome which [the English] will not hear of.” National pride gave rise to a further problem; the relative status of the prospective consort and how he should be styled were sensitive matters, and to the English stipulation that Angoulême should be educated at the Tudor court Francis was reported to have given the haughty response that he would never send his son to reside in England as “a hostage.” By the end of June the Bishop of Faenza was confident that the affair would come to nothing, and cited the weighty reason that the French refused to defy the pope and defend “the cause of the King’s second wife.”

Abortive betrothals of royal children were relatively common; Henry’s elder daughter, Mary, had in turn been officially promised to the dauphin, the Emperor of Spain, and the King of France by the time she was eleven years old. But the failure of Elizabeth’s first wooing had a prophetic significance, in that at the very start of her long life, in which she was to be courted from cradle to grave, the equivocal circumstances of her religious background thus early served as a hurdle to halt a suitor. Elizabeth Tudor was not only a child of the Reformation, she was the child of the Reformation—it was her approaching birth that finally drove the conscience-troubled, heir-craving Henry to defy the pope, complete the rupture with Rome, and effect his own divorce from the menopausal Catherine of Aragon, replacing her with his pregnant love, Anne Boleyn. In orthodox Catholic eyes his actions had no spiritual authority; while Catherine lived she was regarded as his lawful wife and Mary his sole legitimate child, so that Anne Boleyn was “the Concubine,” and Elizabeth “the Little Bastard.” In the Angoulême negotiations Henry stipulated that Francis must give his official approval to the Act of Succession, which flouted the pope and settled the crown on the issue of Anne Boleyn, but, predictably, the Catholic Francis was not prepared to offer such open defiance to the pope for the sake of “the cause of the King’s second wife.” The betrothal plan foundered. Angoulême, elevated by the dauphin’s death to the second brother’s title of Duke of Orléans, died at the age of twenty-three, while serving against the English at Boulogne, in 1545. According to popular report he entered a plague-infested house; swiped about him with his sword; shouted, “Never yet hath a son of France died of the Plague!”; and was dead within three days.

Anne Boleyn’s downfall in 1536, a year after the baby princess’s halfhearted first courtship, further complicated Elizabeth’s personal circumstances. Henry declared his marriage with Anne to have been null, and Elizabeth, like her sister, Mary, was proclaimed a bastard. Henry never revoked their illegitimacy. Both daughters were subsequently recognized and given official status; in the Succession Act of 1544 they were placed in line to the throne after Edward and any children that Catherine Parr might bear to Henry. But the legal flaw in Elizabeth’s rank remained unmended, a potential weakness in her royal status.

The instability of Elizabeth’s public role during her childhood echoed the emotional stresses that her early years brought. It was a valuable preparation for her future life; she acquired resilience and a strong sense of self-preservation, she learned to “seem tame” despite her fiercely independent spirit. She saw the mortal danger of carnal lusts in women: a policy of noli me tangere would have saved the life of Catherine Howard. She saw how her royal father, for whom she was taught utter veneration and admiration, was the embodiment of power and manhood, wielder of fate for the women who married him, and thus she acquired abnormal experience of the impotence and disposability of married women.

The observant, quick-witted, receptive child Elizabeth was eight when her mother’s distant death was grimly reenacted in the beheading of her girlish cousin and stepmother, Catherine Howard. Twenty years later the man who was almost successful in the pursuit of the queen, Robert Dudley, told the French ambassador, “I have known her since she was eight years old, and from that time forth she has always said ‘I will never marry.’ ”