Tudor (54 page)

As usual a book was drawn up of the proposed route of the progress, which the queen would then agree, and she picked the clothes she was to wear. Elizabeth's face now had the squarer jawline of middle age and her aquiline nose drooped a little at the tip, giving it a hooked
appearance. But what she had lost in youth she made up for in the increasing magnificence of her dress. The Spanish-style cone-shaped skirts of the 1560s had given way in the 1570s to much fuller skirts, thickly embroidered fabrics, and still more elaborate ruffs. Elizabeth did not always remember all the clothes, ruffs and jewels she needed for each stop of her progress and she once overheard a carter, who was being sent back on a third trip to the royal warbrobe, slap his thigh, complaining, ‘Now I see that the queen is a woman . . . as well as my wife.' More than her Tudor predecessors, Elizabeth had a sense of humour, and having asked loudly from her window, ‘What a villain is this?', she sent him three coins ‘to stop his mouth'.
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The progress of that summer arrived in Norwich on Saturday 16 August 1578, where amongst the composers of the coming entertainments was a poet called Thomas Churchyard. One of his patrons was Katherine Grey's widower, Hertford, and a principal theme of his shows was to be the virtues of chastity. He had been rehearsing in Norwich for weeks but he was uncertain when and where his performances could go ahead and the weather was unsettled. When the Monday proved dry, Churchyard was determined to seize the opportunity to put on his opening pageant.

Sometime before supper the queen was spotted standing at a window with her ladies. As Churchyard's players swung into action Elizabeth saw an extra ordinary coach appear in the gardens beneath her. It was covered with painted birds and naked sprites and had a tower decked with glass jewels, topped with a plume of white feathers. As the coach rattled by, a boy dressed as Mercury jumped off, made a leap or two and delivered a speech. The subject was God's desire to ‘Find out false hearts, and make of subjects true/Plant perfect peace, and root up all debate.' Elizabeth looked pleased – but his show was not over yet.
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The next day a friend gave Churchyard advance notice of the path the queen was taking to dinner. They set up quickly in a field where a crowd was gathering. Churchyard had a whole morality play organised,
in which the forces of Cupid, Wantonness and Riot were ranged up against Chastity and her lieutenants, Modesty, Temperance and Shamefastness. When Elizabeth arrived it unfolded before her, in praise of the celibate life. She acknowledged Churchyard's efforts politely with ‘gracious words', unaware as yet of the true significance of what she had just witnessed.
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The famous phrase the ‘Virgin Queen' was coined in the parting pageant on Saturday, but Churchyard's show in the open field was the first to celebrate Elizabeth as such. The sobriquet associated Elizabeth with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and when the Anjou match eventually came to nothing like the others before it, a new iconography was born, with classical as well as Christian associations. A favourite theme in the pictures of Elizabeth that courtiers commissioned was the classical story of the Vestal Virgin who proved her chastity by carrying water in a sieve from the river Tiber to the temple of Vesta. At least eight pictures from the period 1579–83 survive depicting Elizabeth holding a sieve. In several of her portraits icons of empire were included, with the abandonment of the Anjou marriage linked to an aggressive foreign policy in which England would found a Protestant empire. But although these are the images of the great queen we still remember, behind the icon stood an isolated figure.

Elizabeth is supposed to have written the verses of yearning ‘to live with some more sweet content' when Anjou left England. But the pain and passion they describe surely have their inspiration in the man she had truly loved: Robert Dudley.

                    
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

                    
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

                    
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

                    
I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.

                    
I am, and not, I freeze and yet am burned,

                    
Since from myself another self I turned.

                    
My care is like my shadow in the sun,

                    
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

                    
Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done.

                    
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

                    
No means I find to rid him from my breast,

                    
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

                    
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

                    
For I am soft and made of melting snow;

                    
Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind.

                    
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.

                    
Or let me live with some more sweet content,

                    
Or die, and so forget what love e'er meant.
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If Robert Dudley had been the son of a king she would have married him, Elizabeth had told the Spanish ambassador Silva in 1565. But Dudley had long since ceased to dream of being her husband. He was desperate now only for a son to carry on his title and inherit his lands. On 21 September 1578, a month after the ‘Virgin Queen' sobriquet was coined, Dudley married Mary Boleyn's granddaughter, Lettice Knollys, the widowed Countess of Essex. The fact that Lettice resembled a younger Elizabeth only added to the queen's anguish when she heard the news over a year later in the winter of 1579. Reportedly it was the French ambassador who told her, in revenge for Dudley's opposition to the Anjou match. Dudley was out of favour for weeks and Elizabeth would never forgive Lettice.
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And there was another unpleasant reminder of the cost to Elizabeth of her spinstershood in the summer and following winter of 1579. It concerned a friend of Robert Dudley, one who was second only to Elizabeth at court in terms of royal blood. She was yet another royal Margaret, the last surviving granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister, the French queen. Born Margaret Clifford, only child of Eleanor Brandon, she was now the Countess of Derby. Under the terms of
Henry VIII's will she had become Elizabeth's heir following the death of her cousin Mary Grey in 1578. The countess had joined forces with Robert Dudley in opposition to the Anjou match, and in August 1579, when the Duke of Anjou had visited Elizabeth secretly, she made the news public. The countess was arrested and her servants interviewed, in the course of which it emerged that she had employed a magician to cast the queen's horoscope and discover when she would die. This was reminiscent of Elizabeth's household when it was apparent that Mary I's pregnancy was not proceeding normally and they had employed the magician John Dee. Imagining the death of a monarch was treason. But Dee's activities seemed to have scared Elizabeth more than they had Mary I. Dee had escaped with his life in 1555 and his prophecies would be used into the 1590s by William Cecil, to raise fears of Catholic threats. Margaret Clifford's magician (she claimed he was only her doctor), on the other hand, was executed. Although the countess lived until 1596, she was never restored to royal favour.
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There remained, however, the certain knowledge that Elizabeth could not live forever, and her likely successor was a far more dangerous figure than the ambitious and foolish Margaret Clifford. Elizabeth had once been ‘a second person' to Mary I, and as such, as she often recalled, she had ‘tasted of the practices against my sister'. ‘I did differ from her in religion and I was sought for divers ways [to overthrow her]', Elizabeth had recalled in 1566. Such was the position now held by Mary, Queen of Scots, and if the brutal crushing of the northern rebellion of 1569 ensured there would not be further such revolts, there remained the dangers to Elizabeth of assassination and invasion. With the failure of the Anjou match, the shrinking Catholic community split and divided. While the vast majority still sought compromise with the state, hoping for some measure of religious toleration, a few were determined to fight back.

Members of the Counter-Reformation order of the Jesuits were amongst the priests recently returned from Europe, and they stiffened the resolve of Catholics to refuse to attend Protestant services, even
if it meant fines, imprisonment or death. Further executions followed, both of priests and of those who sheltered them. Blood spilt demanded a blood price, and a small number of radicalised Catholics were prepared to do whatever it took to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, including murder.

39

THE DAUGHTER OF DEBATE

E
LIZABETH'S COUSIN AND RIVAL, THE THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD
M
ARY
, Queen of Scots, was still lovely in 1579 with fashionably curled hair. Nevertheless a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard depicts a fuller face than in her youth. Like her great-grandmother Elizabeth of York, she was growing stout in middle age and this was exacerbated by the sedentary life she was obliged to live as Elizabeth's prisoner. A woman of great physicality who associated fresh air and vigorous exercise with good health, she had been deprived of both for a decade, and suffered frequent illness. She was grateful when her life was enlivened by the arrival of the lively little Arbella Stuart, in the household of her jailors, the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess.

After Margaret Douglas had died Elizabeth had permitted Arbella to live with her mother and both were in Bess's care. ‘I am utterly unable to express the manifold causes I have to yield your majesty my most humble thanks', Bess wrote to Elizabeth of her ‘gracious goodness' in this regard. Bess was aware there had been several bids for Arbella's wardship, and ‘so much the more am I bound to be your faithful and thankful servant', she acknowledged.

Mary, Queen of Scots grew very fond of Darnley's niece. She tried to persuade her son King James to recognise Arbella's right to inherit the Lennox title, and in her will she even bequeathed Arbella one of her most personal possessions, her French Book of Hours. Unfortunately,
however, by 1582 when Arbella's mother died, Mary's affection for her niece had become complicated by Bess's behaviour.

The Shrewsburys' marriage had collapsed and Bess blamed Mary. As a queen, who also happened to be a prisoner, Mary reigned at the centre of a macabre court, waited on by a full household of servants, paid for and watched over by Shrewsbury, with only intermittent repayment by Queen Elizabeth. He and Bess quarrelled over money and Bess grew jealous of the amount of attention he was obliged to expend on his royal prisoner. Although Mary was becoming crippled by arthritis and had developed a stoop, she remained good company, with an uncanny ability to make whoever she spoke to feel good about themselves. Shrewsbury's respect and affection for her infuriated his wife, who began to spread malicious gossip that Mary and Shrewsbury were having an affair. Mary was still more angered by Bess's growing ambitions for Arbella. ‘Nothing has alienated the countess more from me', Mary wrote to the French ambassador in March 1584, ‘than the vain hope she has conceived of setting the crown on her granddaughter Arbella's head, even by marrying the Earl of Leicester's son.' That particular plan died with the little boy shortly afterwards, and Mary paid Bess back for her malicious gossip with a letter to Elizabeth repeating Bess's stories from court.

As the astute Spanish ambassador, the Count of Feria, had observed in 1558, Elizabeth was extremely vain and, according to Bess, courtiers would vie with each other in offering the aging queen the most outrageous compliments, trying not to laugh as they outdid each other. Bess had also claimed to Mary that Elizabeth had had sex with Robert Dudley and others – at least as she was able to, for, it was said, Elizabeth was deformed internally. When Mary's letter ended up on William Cecil's desk he chose not to show it to Elizabeth, but Mary was transferred out of Shrewsbury's care in August 1584.

Negotiations had begun for a treaty with the now eighteen-year-old King James that would see Mary, Queen of Scots freed, under his assurances of her good conduct, and those of the King of France. Mary
was desperate to believe they would succeed, but fresh anxieties over Elizabeth's security emerged as news reached England of the assassination of William of Orange, the leader of a Dutch revolt against the Spanish in the Netherlands. A month earlier a lone fanatic had shot him dead in his palace – the first ever political assassination carried out with a gun.
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It raised to boiling point fears that Elizabeth's life was in similar danger.

William Cecil and Elizabeth's other councillors were determined that if she died, Mary, Queen of Scots should also be killed. That October they drew up what amounted to an assassins' charter, known as the Bond of Association. Its signatories were sworn to kill anyone they judged might be responsible for Elizabeth's death and that included any Catholic heir to the English throne. It was sent around the country for local county worthies also to sign. That so many proved willing to commit their names to Mary's murder is a mark of how much England had changed since the 1560s when much of the political elite remained Catholic in sympathy, and many Protestants on the Privy Council, amongst them Robert Dudley, had considered Mary the best candidate for the succession. The wider acceptance of Protestantism, and the Catholic threats posed to Elizabeth since the northern rebellion of 1569, had combined to turn Mary, Queen of Scots into a national bogeywoman.