The House of Tudor (45 page)

At the beginning of April 1555, the Queen moved to Hampton Court to ‘take her chamber’ in preparation for her lying-in and towards the end of the month Bedingfield received a summons to bring his charge to the palace. The journey from Woodstock was made in typical blustery spring weather and the party encountered violent squalls and gusts of wind which got under the ladies’ skirts and blew the princess’s hood from her head. She wanted to take shelter in a nearby gentleman’s house but Bedingfield, inflexible to the end, refused to allow even this slight deviation from the itinerary, and Elizabeth had to do up her hair under a hedge as best she could.

She was brought to Hampton Court by a back entrance, still under close guard. According to a French source, Philip came to see her privately three days later, but it was nearly a fortnight before any official notice was taken of her arrival. Then she received a visit from a deputation headed by the Lord Chancellor himself, who urged her to submit herself to the Queen. If she did so, he had no doubt that her Majesty would be disposed to be merciful. Elizabeth answered sharply that she wanted justice not mercy. She was not going to ask pardon for crimes she had not committed. Besides, if once she yielded and confessed herself to be an offender, the Queen would never trust her again. It would be better for her to He in prison for the truth, than to be abroad and suspected of her prince.

There was silence for another week and then, suddenly, at ten o’clock one night, a summons came for Elizabeth to go at once to the Queen. She had been agitating for a personal interview for more than a year, but now the moment had come and as she was walking with her escort through the darkness she must have wondered what the outcome would be. At the foot of the staircase leading to the Queen’s lodging, the little procession halted. Bedingfield waited outside while Elizabeth, accompanied by one of the Queen’s ladies and one of her own, went up to her sister’s bedroom. Without giving Mary a chance to speak, she fell on her knees and once again proclaimed her innocence. ‘You will not confess your offence’, said Mary out of the shadows, ‘but stand stoutly to your truth. I pray God it may so fall out.’ ‘If it doth not’, answered Elizabeth, ‘I request neither favour nor pardon at your Majesty’s hands.’ ‘Well’, came the somewhat ungracious response, ‘you stiffly still persevere in your truth. Belike you will not confess but that you have been wrongfully punished.’ ‘I must not say so, if it please your Majesty, to you.’ ‘Why then’, persisted the Queen, ‘belike you will to others.’ ‘No’, said Elizabeth, no, if it please your Majesty, I have borne the burden and must bear it. I humbly beseech your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me to be your true subject, not only from the beginning, but forever, as long as life lasteth.’

As she stared at the supple figure of her sister, kneeling before her in the candlelight, Mary knew that she had lost the battle of wills. She must accept, however reluctantly, Elizabeth’s assurances of loyalty and make her peace with Anne Boleyn’s daughter.

Elizabeth was now relieved of Sir Henry Bedingfield and his departure marked the end of a period of detention which had lasted just over fifteen months. She remained at Court and, although not yet fully restored to favour, had regained a limited freedom of action. A freedom which she wisely used with caution for Elizabeth, like everyone else that summer, was in a state of suspended animation while the uncertainty surrounding the Queen’s impending confinement hung like a fog blotting out the future. If, against all the odds, Mary did succeed in bearing a healthy child - and Mary had already once succeeded against all the odds - then the political scene would be transformed, perhaps for generations to come. As Simon Renard observed, ‘everything in this kingdom depends on the Queen’s safe deliverance’.

By mid-April all was ready. The palace was crowded with noble ladies summoned to assist at the Queen’s delivery. Midwives, nurses and rockers were in attendance, and the empty cradle waited. Here, nearly eighteen years before, Edward Tudor had been born. Was another Tudor prince about to draw his first breath in Cardinal Wolsey’s fine red-brick mansion? Everything possible was being done to encourage the Queen. The Venetian ambassador reported on 2 April that to comfort her and give her heart and courage ‘three most beautiful infants were brought for her Majesty to see; they having been born a few days previously at one birth, of a woman of low stature and great age like the Queen, who after delivery found herself strong and out of danger.’

At daybreak on 30 April a rumour reached London that Mary had given birth to a son just after midnight ‘with little pain and no danger’. So circumstantial was this report that it was generally believed and bonfires were lit, church bells rung and ‘in divers places Te Deum Laudamus was sung’, while loyal citizens set up trestles before their doors and began dispensing free food and drink to their neighbours. It was late afternoon before the messengers returning from Hampton Court brought the dispiriting news that there was no son or daughter either and that the birth was not even imminent. As the days of waiting lengthened into weeks, the doctors announced that their calculations had been wrong, that the Queen would not now be delivered until the end of May, possibly not until the first week of June, although her Majesty’s belly had greatly declined, a sign, it was said, of the nearer approach of the term.

June turned into July and the doctors and midwives were still talking about miscalculation, still promising the wretched Queen that she was carrying a child, but saying the birth might be delayed until August or even September. By this time, though, everyone knew that no baby would ever fill that ‘very sumptuously and gorgeously trimmed’ cradle. The amenorrhea and digestive troubles to which Mary had always been subject, perhaps, too, cancer of the womb, had combined with her desperate longing which - according to the omniscient diplomatic corps - even produced ‘swelling of the paps and their emission of milk’ to create that tragic, long-drawn-out self-deception.

By the end of July the situation at Hampton Court was becoming too embarrassing to be allowed to continue any longer. Something had to be done to silence the ribald ale-house gossip and all those inevitable rumours about humble mothers being begged to give up their new-born babies to emissaries from the palace. The daily processions and prayers for the Queen’s delivery were stopped and on 3 August the Court moved away to Oatlands in a tacit admission that Mary had at last given up hope. But as she struggled to come to terms with her bitter disappointment and humiliation, she had another sorrow to face - for the adored husband, on whom she had lavished all the love so long denied an outlet, was planning to leave her. Philip had now spent thirteen months in a country he disliked, being affable to people he despised and distrusted, being kind to a demanding, physically unattractive and unfruitful wife. He considered he had done everything that could reasonably be expected of him.

He was to embark at Dover as soon as the escorting fleet could be made ready and on 26 August the Court moved down to Greenwich to see him off. Three days later he was gone, after punctiliously kissing all the ladies, just as he had done that first evening in Winchester, and Mary stood in tears at a window overlooking the river watching until the barge taking him away to Gravesend had passed out of her sight. It was the end of her brief happiness.

The Queen planned to stay at Greenwich during Philip’s absence and Reginald Pole was given apartments in the palace, so that he might ‘comfort and keep her company, her Majesty delighting greatly in the sight and presence of him’. Elizabeth was also at Greenwich, though it is doubtful if her presence gave Mary any particular pleasure. However, Elizabeth was now in a privileged position. She had used those weeks of waiting at Hampton Court to good purpose and, at least according to the Venetian ambassador, had ‘contrived so to ingratiate herself with all the Spaniards and especially the King, that ever since no one has favoured her more than he does.’ Years later a report circulated that Philip had been heard to admit that whatever he suffered from Queen Elizabeth was no more than the just judgement of God, because ‘being married to Queen Mary, whom he thought a most virtuous and good lady, yet in the fancy of love he could not affect her; but as for the Lady Elizabeth, he was enamoured of her, being a fair and beautiful woman.’ Whether Philip was really smitten by his sister-in-law’s charms remains a matter for conjecture but he had clearly made up his mind that notwithstanding her dubious birth and heretical tendencies, she would make an infinitely preferable successor to the English throne than Mary Queen of Scots. Before he left England, therefore, he had particularly commended Elizabeth to Mary’s good will and (this time according to the French ambassador) was soon writing from the Low Countries to repeat what was virtually an order to the Queen to handle her sister with courtesy and care. Since Philip’s lightest wish was Mary’s command, she obediently choked down her instinctive antipathy, treating the princess graciously in public and only conversing with her about ‘agreeable subjects’.

September turned into October with no sign of Philip’s return and Mary was obliged to abandon her vigil and go back to London for the opening of Parliament. Elizabeth did not accompany her. She had been given permission to leave the Court and on 18 October she passed through the City on her way to Hatfield. Settled once more in her favourite residence after an absence of over two years, she began to take up the threads of her old life and to gather her old friends round her again.

Things, in fact, were looking up for Elizabeth. She had made a powerful ally in Philip. Simon Renard had been recalled to Brussels and was no longer dropping poison into Mary’s ear, and in November another old enemy disappeared with the death of Stephen Gardiner. The princess knew that time was now on her side. She had only to wait - and she was good at waiting - steer clear of politics and, above all, avoid any matrimonial entanglements, and sooner or later the prize would fall into her lap.

13: ENGLAND’S ELIZA

After the stormy, tempestuous and blustering windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed and the dashing showers of persecution overpast; it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus from former broils, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.

He last years of Mary’s life were for the Queen years of increasing ill-health, unhappiness and disillusion. For the English people they were a time of economic depression and political divisions and uncertainty, while the religious persecution which has left such an indelible stain on Mary’s memory helped to thicken the general atmosphere of gloom and discontent. The first heretics had been burnt in February 1555 and altogether some three hundred men and women were doomed to suffer this particularly revolting form of death. It was not, by contemporary standards, an especially harsh campaign and affected only a small section of the population but it remains an unpleasant episode, one of its least attractive features being the fact that the vast majority of the victims were humble people: poor widows, journeymen and apprentices, agricultural labourers, weavers, clothworkers, artisans and tradesmen who died in agony for the sake of what they believed to be God’s truth. The better-to-do Protestants either conformed just sufficiently to keep out of trouble, or else took their consciences abroad more or less unhindered.

From the point of view of what it hoped to achieve, the Marian persecution was totally and monumentally counter-productive. The fires which consumed the Protestant bishops Hooper, Latimer and Ridley who, with Thomas Cranmer, were virtually the only sufferers of note, did indeed light such a candle in England as, with God’s grace, never was put out. But perhaps the most inept act, both psychologically and politically, of an inept administration was the degradation and martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer. Having once recanted, the former archbishop, that gentle, kindly, diffident man, was driven at last beyond fear or doubt and died publicly proclaiming the Pope to be one of Christ’s enemies and Anti-Christ. Had his life been spared, as according to precedent the life of a penitent heretic should have been spared, Cranmer would have been one of the most notable apostates in history and worth more to the Catholic cause than all the Protestant martyrs put together. Unhappily, though, Mary’s hatred could only be assuaged by fire. Cranmer was the false shepherd who had deliberately led the silly, credulous sheep into the fires of hell. He was also the man who had given her father his divorce.

But Cranmer had not been the only false shepherd and, if a persistent, well-attested rumour is to be believed, Mary took another and more macabre revenge during these dark years. After Edward’s death, all work on the grandiose tomb of Henry VIII had been stopped and decades later Sir Francis Englefield, one of Mary’s most trusted friends and councillors who became an exile for his religion under Elizabeth, told the Jesuit Robert Parsons that he had himself been present at Windsor when Cardinal Pole, at Mary’s command, had the embalmed corpse of the greatest schismatic and heretic of them all exhumed and burnt.

Mary yearned for Philip, but the months passed and there was still no sign of his return. The old Emperor, preparing to bow off the stage and end his days in a monastery, had now handed over all his burdens, save the Empire and Burgundy, to his son and in future Philip would have less time than ever to spare for England, He sent only promises - promises repeatedly and cynically broken - in reply to her self-abasing pleas that he would come back to her. Mary’s last birthday had been her fortieth and she could only rage and despair by turn as her stubborn, unquenchable hopes of bearing children were mocked by her husband’s absence.

Then, at the end of March 1557, Philip did come back. It was for a short visit only, with only one objective - to drag England into the everlasting Franco-Spanish war, just as the King of France had always predicted he would. By July he was gone and this time, as if she guessed she would never see him again, Mary went with him to Dover, down to the water’s edge. But Philip had left a piece of unfinished business behind which continued to nag at him. He had long since resigned himself to the fact that Elizabeth would succeed her sister and Elizabeth, at twenty-three, was still unmarried, still unfettered to the Spanish interest.