The House of Tudor (49 page)

In the summer of 1565 an element of black comedy entered the story. On 21 August William Cecil wrote tersely to his friend Sir Thomas Smith: ‘Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous. The sergeant-porter, being the biggest gentleman in this court, hath married secretly the Lady Mary Grey, the least of all the court. They are committed to separate prisons. The offence is very great.’ The current Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, passing on the news to King Philip, recorded that Mary Grey, who was little, crookbacked and very ugly, had married a gentleman named Keys, sergeant-porter at the palace. ‘They say’, he added, ‘the Queen is very much annoyed and grieved thereat.’

In fact, this grotesquely pathetic attachment between dwarfish, nineteen-year-old Mary Grey and the enormous gate-keeper, a middle-aged widower with several children, was the last straw as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Both the Grey sisters were now under strict house arrest and Katherine had given up all hope of release. She died in January 1568 at the age of twenty-seven of a mixture of tuberculosis and a broken heart. Two years later Hertford was at last allowed to go free, although the Queen never really forgave him. The Earl remained faithful to Katherine’s memory for nearly thirty years, eventually marrying again to a daughter of the powerful Howard clan. But he never gave up the fight to have his first marriage recognized and his sons’ legitimacy established - a fight he finally won in 1606. He lived on until 1621 and was to see his grandson maintain the family tradition by trying to elope with Lady Arbella Stuart, another member of the royal house.

Mary Grey - or rather Mary Keys, for the legality of her improbable marriage never seems to have been challenged - spent about six years as the involuntary house-guest of various unwilling hosts, but was released after her husband’s death; she at least had never compounded her offence by having children. The last sad little remnant of the once great house of Suffolk died in poverty and obscurity in the summer of 1578; but outcast though she had become, under the terms of her great-uncle’s will Mary Keys died heiress to the throne of England - that deadly legacy which had ruined the lives of the descendants of Mary Brandon, born Mary Tudor.

14: WHEN HEMPE IS SPUN

The trivial prophecy which I heard when I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years, was,

‘When hempe is sponne England’s done’

whereby it was generally conceived, that after the princes had reigned which had the principal letters of that word ‘hempe’ (which were Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip, and Elizabeth), England should come to utter confusion; which, thanks be to God, is verified only in the change of name; for that the king’s style is now no more of England but of Britain.

Francis Bacon

By 1568, after ten years on the English throne, Elizabeth Tudor had matured into a vigorous, elegant, self-confident woman in her mid-thirties, who, by intelligent statecraft and good housekeeping, had lifted her country out of its mid-century doldrums and won the respect, if not always the approval, of her fellow monarchs. Any misgivings which her subjects may once have felt about embarking on another experience of petticoat government had long since vanished and the love affair between Queen and people - foundation and cornerstone of the whole astonishing Elizabethan epic – was already a vital part of the national ethos. As a relationship it is something unique in history and, like most love affairs, defies too close an analysis. Probably it was best and most succinctly described in two verses of the popular ballad –
A Song Between the Queen’s Majestie and Englande
– first printed in 1571, but written quite early in the reign.

I am thy lover fair,

Hath chosen thee to mine heir;

And my name is merry Englande;

Therefore, come away,

And make no more delay,

Sweet Bessie! Give me thy hand.

Here is my hand.

My dear lover Englande,

I am thine both with mind and heart,

Forever to endure,

Thou mayest be sure,

Until death us two do part.

‘Until death us two do part’...The fear that Elizabeth might die with the succession still unsettled haunted all politically conscious Englishmen, who were only too well aware that their present peace and prosperity depended, quite literally, on the slender thread of the Queen’s life. The terrifying ease with which that thread might be cut was demonstrated in the autumn of 1562, when Elizabeth caught a virulent strain of smallpox and did very nearly die. Not surprisingly, this scare led to a renewed onslaught on the Queen to name her successor and to get married. When Parliament met in January 1563, the Speaker of the Commons wasted no time in presenting a petition referring to ‘the great terror and dreadful warning’ of the Queen’s illness. He went on to paint a gloomy picture of the ‘unspeakable miseries’ of civil war, foreign interference, bloodshed and destruction of lives, property and liberty which lay in wait for the country if she were to die without a known heir. A few days later, the House of Lords presented another, similar petition which begged the Queen to dispose herself to marry ‘where it shall please you, to whom it shall please you, and as soon as it shall please you’.

The Queen received these impassioned pleas graciously enough, but she would not be stampeded into action she might later regret. She knew she was mortal, she told the Commons, and asked them to believe that she, who had always been so careful of her subjects’ welfare in other matters, would not be careless in this, which concerned them all so nearly. But, because it was a matter of such importance, she would not make any hasty answer. In fact, she would defer making any answer at all until she had been able to consider it further. ‘And so I assure you all’, she ended, ‘that, though after my death you may have many step-dames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all.’

Elizabeth succeeded in stalling Parliament - although there were some rebellious mutterings in the Commons about withholding subsidies if she continued to be obstinate - but the problem refused to go away. It was, after all, the same problem which had overshadowed English political life ever since the death of Prince Arthur in 1502. Elizabeth was fully alive to the dangers of the situation. On the other hand, she was even more acutely aware of the danger of having a named heir.

As far as marriage, with its necessarily uncertain corollary of childbearing, was concerned, the Queen, quite apart from her personal inclinations and her reluctance to lose her most valuable card in the game of international diplomacy, could see the practical difficulties involved far more clearly than her faithful Lords and Commons. Since the death of Edward Courtenay, there was no available Englishman of sufficiently high rank to make him acceptable to his fellows and if Elizabeth were to marry a subject, she would arouse violent jealousies and animosities - the uproar over Robert Dudley had already proved that. If she chose a foreigner, the problems would have been as great, if not greater. Nationalistic feeling would once again have run high and, to make matters worse, pretty well every eligible European prince was a Roman Catholic. The consort of a sixteenth-century queen regnant could not remain a cipher; he would have expected, and been expected, to take an active part in the government. But to attempt to introduce a Catholic king into an increasingly fervent Protestant country would have been asking for the most alarming variety of trouble.

Elizabeth’s instinct was to do nothing and to go on gambling on her own survival. ‘So long as I live’, she once remarked, ‘I shall be Queen of England. When I am dead, they shall succeed that have most right.’ But she was a reasonable woman. She could understand and sympathize with her subjects’ natural anxiety about their own and their children’s future, and during the early sixties she did cautiously explore the possibility of finding a way out of the impasse. It was, however, perfectly plain that, her father’s will and the Protestant preferences of her people regardless, Elizabeth never for one moment contemplated recognizing the claims of English and Protestant Katherine Grey. If a solution acceptable to the Queen of England were to be found, it would involve the Queen of Scotland.

During the first decade of her cousin’s reign, the fortunes of Mary Stuart had fluctuated wildly. In 1558 she had apparently stood on the threshold of a career of unexampled brilliance. In the summer of 1559 the freakish death of her father-in-law, Henri II, in a tiltyard accident had brought her to the throne of France beside her youthful husband. She was a Queen twice over at the age of sixteen-and-a-half. Then in December 1560 the sickly François II was also dead and Mary had become a widow three days before her eighteenth birthday. ‘The thoughts of widowhood at so early an age’, commented a sympathetic Venetian, Michel Surian, ‘and of the loss of a consort who was so great a King and who so dearly loved her...so afflict her that she will not receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant tears and passionate and doleful lamentations, she universally inspires great pity.’

All the same, Mary soon began to cheer up and to take stock of her altered situation. Her ten-year-old brother-in-law was now King of France and power had passed into the hands of the Queen Mother, that formidable matriarch Catherine de Medici, who was making no particular secret of the fact that she would prefer the Queen of Scots’ room to her company. Mary Stuart had been brought up to regard her Scottish kingdom as a mere appanage of France but now, in the spring of 1561, Scotland appeared in a rather different light. To a full-blooded, optimistic teenager with little taste for taking a back seat, it offered a challenge and a promise of adventure with, perhaps, more glittering triumphs to come. The question was, would Scotland have her back, for there, too, things had changed.

Two years before, the Protestant nobility, banded together under the title of the Lords of the Congregation and assisted, albeit somewhat reluctantly, by the Queen of England, had risen in revolt against the Catholic and alien government of Mary’s mother, the Queen Regent Mary of Guise. In June 1560 the Regent died and French influence in Scotland reached its lowest ebb for a generation. William Cecil had hurried up to Edinburgh to attend the peace talks and during the course of a fortnight’s hard bargaining succeeded in extracting a number of important concessions from the French commissioners acting on behalf of the young Queen and her husband. The religious question was tactfully left in abeyance but when the Scots Parliament met in August, they at once proceeded of their own authority to adopt the Calvinistic form of Protestantism as the national religion. In the circumstances, therefore, it was scarcely surprising that the Lords of the Congregation should have been less than enthusiastic over the projected return of their Catholic sovereign.

Mary, as Queen of France, had refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh and in the autumn of 1560 had expressed strong disapproval of the proceedings in the Scottish Parliament. ‘My subjects of Scotland do their duty in nothing, nor have they performed one point that belongeth to them’, she told Nicholas Throckmorton. ‘I am their sovereign, but they take me not so. They must be taught to know their duties.’ By the spring of 1561 she was no longer in a position to take such a high tone and instead set herself out to charm the English and Scottish envoys who came to France to look her over. She repeatedly declared her earnest desire to live in peace and friendship with Elizabeth, ‘her good sister and tender cousin’, and also declared her willingness to accept the new status quo in Scotland. Not, of course, that she could have done otherwise but she did it gracefully, insisting only that she must be given the right to practise her own religion in private, and as it dawned on the Protestant lords that their Queen’s dynastic potentialities would now work in favour of Scotland rather than France, they began to take a more optimistic view of the future.

Young Mary Stuart was, in fact, winning golden opinions all round and Nicholas Throckmorton’s dispatches were full of her virtue and discretion, her good judgement, her modesty and her readiness to be ruled by good counsel. It may not have been very tactful to praise one Queen to another in quite such glowing terms, but Throckmorton had not yet forgiven his mistress for the acute embarrassment she had caused him over the Dudley affair. Elizabeth, for her part, was clearly disconcerted by the seductive qualities being exhibited by her eighteen-year-old cousin. If Mary could so captivate Nicholas Throckmorton, a hard-headed diplomat and a strict Protestant, who could tell what havoc the pretty creature might create among the excitable and boisterous Scottish warlords? Who could tell how many simple men might be ‘carried away with vain hope, and brought abed with fair words’?

As it turned out Mary Stuart’s first three years in her northern kingdom were by no means unsuccessful. Her subjects, with the exception of that archetypal male chauvinist John Knox, were ready to be pleased with her and Mary, although never of the same political calibre as Elizabeth Tudor, had had the sense to make friends with her bastard half-brother, the influential James Stuart, Earl of Moray. With Moray’s efficient and tough-minded support, she was able to manage reasonably well at home. Abroad, all her efforts were directed towards ingratiating herself with the Queen of England and persuading Elizabeth to recognize her as heir presumptive to the English throne.

Elizabeth seemed prepared to be friendly. She was even ready to admit, in private conversation with the Scottish envoy William Maitland of Lethington, that she personally considered Mary to be her natural and lawful successor; but further than that she would not go. She would not make her good sister and cousin her heir ‘by order of Parliament’, which was what Mary was after. Unless...and there was just one possible solution. The widowed Queen of Scotland was very nearly as eligible a match as the spinster Queen of England Virtually everything would depend on the identity of Mary’s second husband and it was during the spring of 1563, when Elizabeth was desperately looking for some way of relieving the almost intolerable pressure being exerted on her to settle the succession, that she first proposed Robert Dudley as a bridegroom for Mary Stuart. On the face of it, it seemed such an eccentric suggestion that William Maitland thought the Queen must be joking. But no, she was apparently quite serious. That autumn, Thomas Randolph, the English agent in Edinburgh, was instructed to drop broad hints on the subject to Mary herself and finally, in the spring of 1564, Elizabeth authorized Randolph to make the matter official.