Tudor (53 page)

Elizabeth eventually concluded that the arrangement of the marriage between Margaret's son and Bess's daughter had only ‘money at the ground of it', and, with nothing else ‘that may cause twitch', Margaret was released after a few months of house arrest at her home in Hackney.
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As for Bess, she managed to buy back the queen's good favour with little more than the gift of an expensive cloak she embroidered for Elizabeth as a New Year's gift.

Margaret was, however, soon establishing a rapprochement with Mary, Queen of Scots, just as Elizabeth had feared she might. Margaret had not forgotten the murder of Darnley, but she had become convinced that Mary was innocent of any involvement in his death. Mary's guilt had supposedly been proven in 1568 when a tribunal in York and Westminster had established the authenticity of a series of papers known as the Casket letters, sent by the Scottish government as ‘evidence' of Mary's role. We now know the letters had included a number of forgeries, but since there was no chance whatever of any independent forensic analysis at the time, the easiest way to debunk them was to retaliate in kind. This Mary's friends had now done with a forged deathbed confession by Bothwell which exculpated Mary of
any involvement in Darnley's death, and pointed the finger instead at the nine-year-old King James' latest regent, James Douglas, Earl of Morton.
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He had admitted knowing of the plot, and that was enough to convince Margaret, whose hatred was now directed at ‘the wicked governor', rather than Mary, Queen of Scots.

James' safety was a shared source of concern for his mother and grandmother, and in a letter to Mary dated November 1575, Margaret Douglas confided her fears that ‘our sweet and peerless jewel in Scotland' was not safe in Morton's care. But Margaret also now had another grandchild to think about: Charles and his wife had a baby daughter: Arbella Stuart. Mary had sent the little girl gifts and Margaret expressed the hope that Arbella ‘someday may serve your highness'.
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The two women continued thereafter to exchange tokens as well as letters. They included a piece of extremely fine and expensive needlework Margaret had worked with her own hair as a mark of her devotion. This remarkable turnaround in Margaret's attitude to Mary had an important pay-off: Mary revised her will, naming Charles as the heir to his nephew, King James.

When Charles died of an unknown cause in 1576, Margaret had yet another ‘sorrowful grief' to endure. But her pain at the loss of the last of her eight children was ameliorated when the little Arbella and her mother came to live with her. A picture she had painted of Arbella, aged twenty-three months, depicts a hazel-eyed infant clutching a fashionably dressed doll, and around Arbella's neck, hanging from a triple chain of gold, hangs a shield with the countess' coronet along with the Lennox motto in French, ‘To achieve, I endure'. Arbella's place in the line of succession was very similar to Margaret's in the 1530s. Where, by the tradition of primogeniture, Margaret had been second in line to James V, but had the advantage of her English birth, so Arbella was second to James VI, but also had the advantage of being English-born. Nevertheless, as far as Margaret was concerned the English throne remained destined for James, and was rightfully his.

From her houses in Yorkshire and Hackney Margaret kept in contact with her growing grandson, sending James works of history, and on one occasion a pair of beautiful pearl-embroidered hawking gloves. But her servant, John Philips, recalled that by 1578, when she was aged sixty-two, Margaret seemed worn down by the loss of her beloved husband and children. Money was tight, too. Margaret had to pay £500 a year to Bess alone in interest on loans. Yet, despite everything, Margaret remained engaged in politics and continued to entertain the powerful and influential. At a dinner in February 1578 she had Robert Dudley as her guest. This was a woman who could remember Henry VIII intimately, and had witnessed the falls of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard from the close quarters of the queen's Privy Chambers. But she and Robert Dudley also had memories to share, as well as a future to argue over.
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Robert Dudley was no longer a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots. After the rebellion of 1569 and the Ridolfi plot, he had become, instead, a protector of the Puritans: those Protestants who wanted further reform in the Church of England. In this he had little in common with Margaret and it was later claimed that he poisoned her at this last dinner. Perhaps the food disagreed with her and she fell ill, just as her ancestress Margaret Beaufort had after eating swan almost sixty years before.

Margaret wrote her last testament on 26 February 1578, still in ‘perfect mind' and ‘good health of body'. It asked that when she died the body of her son Charles be moved from his tomb at her house in Hackney, to be buried with her in Westminster Abbey. She had already chosen the spot for her tomb in the Lady Chapel where her grandfather Henry VII was buried. £1,200 was put aside for her funeral and burial expenses. She matched this with a gift of £1,200 for the poor. William Cecil was bequeathed a black enamel ring set with four diamonds, and Robert Dudley a chain of pomander beads netted with gold. She also left him her tablet picture of Henry VIII. Even in death it was
important to grease the right palms – especially if you wanted a grand funeral in Westminster Abbey.

Margaret Douglas died on 10 March and on 3 April she had a funeral appropriate for a royal princess, and with a service of which Elizabeth would approve.
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Nothing had been written in her will that distinguished her as Catholic or Protestant and there were no marks of Catholic belief at her funeral.
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Margaret obeyed the letter of the law, as she was obliged to do and had always done in public. The tomb she had wanted was later set up by her secretary Thomas Fowler. In an echo of the Lennox motto, ‘To achieve I endure', it celebrated ‘a lady of most pious character, invincible spirit, and matchless steadfastness' who was ‘mighty in virtue' and ‘mightier yet in lineage'. Few tombs in the abbey matched the royal ancestors she had listed on her tomb, but she was prouder still to be ‘a progenitor of princes' in her son Darnley, known as Henry, King of Scots, and in her grandson King James. One day, she had hoped, he too would lie in this abbey, as a King of England.

38

THE VIRGIN QUEEN

W
AS IT BETTER FOR A QUEEN WHO COULD NOT MARRY NEVER TO
have felt love? In verse Elizabeth begged ‘let me live with some more sweet content/Or die and so forget what love e'er meant'.
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Her father, Henry VIII, had feared it would be hard to find a king consort for a Tudor queen ‘with whom the whole realm could and would be contented', and so it had proved.
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The anxieties she had expressed to the emissary of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1561, that she could not marry without triggering unrest, had deepened following Mary's disastrous marriages to Darnley and Bothwell. Elizabeth continued to look publicly for a husband to fulfil national expectations, and surely hoped it was not impossible that she might find someone suitable, but in their absence she had settled for something akin to a celibate marriage with Robert Dudley. It was a kind of ‘sweet content'.

People always rushed to see Elizabeth and Dudley together. The antiquarian John Stow recalled witnessing them meeting in 1566. Dudley had entered London with a train of 700 lords, knights and gentlemen accompanied by the queen's footmen, as well as his own. They marched from Temple Bar, through the City, across London Bridge into Southwark while the queen came ‘secretly [across the water] taking a wherry with one pair of oars for her and two other ladies'. When she landed Elizabeth got into a blue coach and as Dudley and his army reached her on the highway, she came out and greeted
him with kisses, before she mounted a horse and they rode on together to Greenwich Palace. That night Stow had watched Dudley return to London in advance of the queen, his way lit by the strange glow of the Northern Lights.
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Nine years later, in 1575, Robert Dudley had prepared a magnificent eighteen days of entertainment for Elizabeth's visit to his seat at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. When the great day came Elizabeth had enjoyed a feast in a specially built pavilion before Dudley rode with her to his castle, the flickering flames of the candles from the windows reflected in the lake and glittering like a vision from a fairy tale. Over the following two and a half weeks there were masques, pageants and dramas, with the subject of marriage a constant theme. But Elizabeth would turn forty-five in 1578, suitors had come and gone for two decades, and the pretence that she would ever marry was coming to an end.

One last serious discussion of a match was under way with Elizabeth courted by the twenty-four-year-old brother of the French king Henri III, the Duke of Anjou. The old friendship with Spain had soured over their religious differences and the English piracy of Spanish gold brought back from their colonies in the New World. Elizabeth needed France as a friend, but to England's beleaguered Catholics the marriage proposal also represented the desperate hope of an end to the increasingly vicious persecution to which they were being subjected.

On Elizabeth's accession new legislation had required all clerics, lay office holders and the heirs to large estates to swear an oath denying papal authority. In notable contrast to the Henrician bishops, all but one of the carefully picked Marian bishops had refused to take it and had consequently been deprived of office. In Oxford the head of all but one of the colleges had also resigned or were sacked. This had left Catholics in the parishes largely leaderless, as priests either became Protestant ministers or left their posts.

Over the following years bewildered congregations had seen remaining rood screens, with their images of Christ, Mary and St John,
replaced with the royal arms of the supreme governor of the Church of England. Newly whitewashed walls were decorated only with biblical quotations, there was no holy water with which to cross themselves, no candles, everything was plain and without colour, while elaborate music too was frowned on as a distraction from prayer.

This cultural revolution was not entirely to Elizabeth's taste. She employed the Catholic composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in the royal chapels. She issued proclamations in an effort to protect ancient monuments, fonts and altars from wholesale destruction. Elizabeth believed that rood screens were ‘rather for the advantage of the church' and she retained candles and a crucifix on the Communion table in her chapel.
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In 1565, when the dean of St Paul's gave a sermon attacking Catholic writing in praise of the Cross, she interrupted him saying loudly, ‘Do not talk about that.'
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But even the queen's plain silver crucifix, described as a ‘foul idol' placed ‘on the altar of abomination', was twice broken and attacked in sermons by members of her clergy. Her subjects were far less able to protect their churches from zealous iconoclasts.

In 1562 the Bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, had sneered at his parishioners, imitating them wailing, ‘What shall I do at the church? I may not have my [rosary] beads, [and] the church is like a waste barn; there are no images or saints to worship and make curtsey too . . . there is nothing but a little reading or preaching that I cannot tell what it means. I had as leaf keep me at home.'
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But avoiding church was not permitted, with ever-heavier fines for those who did, with the result that a generation had grown up used both to white walls and to the new pattern in which Morning Prayer replaced the Mass. Some old habits, such as placing crosses on graves, were hard to break, and many remained ignorant of basic Protestant doctrine. Ordinary people continued to believe that good deeds played some part in their salvation and couldn't, or wouldn't, understand the Protestant doctrine of predestination for an elect few. As one contemporary noted, ‘heaps' of people had ‘cast away the old religion without discovering the new'.
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But by and large acceptance for the new ways of worship was successfully being reinforced by the desire to be loyal to the Crown, by propaganda such as the copies distributed to parishes of Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
, with its descriptions of the deaths of the Protestants burned by Mary I, and also by fear of the consequences of opposition.

As the Catholic communities had shrunk so they had also become subjected to intense attacks at the hands of the Elizabethan regime. These had worsened dramatically following the 1569 northern rebellion, especially after Pope Pius V had answered a request by the rebel earls to excommunicate the queen, pronouncing her ‘deprived of her pretended title to the . . . crown'. The vast majority of Catholics had remained loyal – and there had been no signs of revolt in counties like Hampshire where Catholicism remained strong.
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Nevertheless it had meant Catholics could be painted as traitors by reason of their faith alone, and in 1577 the first of many Catholic priests to be executed by Elizabeth had been hanged, disembowelled while alive, and quartered.

English Catholics reasoned that Elizabeth's fears would be greatly reduced if she were married to a Catholic, but their hopes for the Anjou marriage were matched by Protestant opposition. Steeped in dread of the biblical apocalypse and deeply aware of the religious divisions within their own ranks, at home and abroad, pious Protestants greatly overestimated Catholic unity. A massacre of Protestants in Paris by Mary's Guise relatives in 1572 tapped into fears that they faced possible extinction at Catholic hands, and English priests who had trained in Europe, and who began returning to tend to their abandoned flocks, were seen as a dangerous fifth column. These divisions over the Anjou match were to be played out during the royal progress into East Anglia that summer.