Authors: Susan Ronald
When Mary’s latest phantom pregnancy in the spring of 1558 did not produce a child, it was obvious to King Philip, the Privy Council, and the court that the swelling in Mary’s abdomen was a tumor and not the heir that the king and queen had so desired. With only Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, remaining as a potential heir apparent, this left Philip in no doubt as to the course of action to be undertaken: Elizabeth must be set free and named as his wife’s heir. If Mary Queen of Scots were to take the throne of England, she would have become queen of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. These titles and kingdoms would have been added to her title as Queen of France, since she had lived in the French court since the age of five and had married the Dauphin Francis earlier in the year. Although Catholic, Philip was not prepared to allow the teenagers Mary and Francis to become the powerful pawns to Francis’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici. At all cost, he must stop the French crown from trying to abscond with Elizabeth’s throne.
Besides, Philip could not promote Mary Stuart’s claim to the English throne above his own, since he, too, had a direct claim through his mother, Isabelle of Portugal, a descendant of John of Gaunt of Lancaster. No, Elizabeth was a far better alternative as heir presumptive for Philip despite the fact that he had long known that she practiced the Protestant rites in private. This may have been the most important act of religious tolerance and clemency in the history of his long rule.
While Philip was agonizing over his deliberations and eventually paving the road for Elizabeth to take the crown, the English nobility—Protestant and Catholic alike—had already made up their minds. A mood of desperation had crept over the country. As the autumn of 1558 turned chillier in early November, the roads to Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, Elizabeth’s childhood home, were gridlocked with those who had served her half sister,
as well as others who had been exiled from power. All of them were singular in their purpose: to serve the new queen and better their positions.
For the power brokers like William Cecil, who had served faithfully as secretary of state for Mary and Philip, Elizabeth not only represented the only viable successor, but also a fiercely intelligent one with whom he could do business. Others had different viewpoints. Philip’s ambassador, Count Feria, who had also made his way to Hatfield, wrote to the king on November 10 that “she is a very vain and clever woman. She must have been thoroughly schooled in the manner in which her father conducted his affairs and I am very much afraid that she will not be well-disposed in matters of religion…. There is not a heretic or traitor in all the kingdom who has not joyfully raised himself from the grave to come to her side. She is determined to be governed by no one.”
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This was no “news” to Philip. During Elizabeth’s imprisonment in the Tower, she had written to Mary that “I so well like this estate [spinsterhood] as I persuade myself there is not any kind of life comparable unto it…no though I were offered to the greatest prince of all Europe…[I would] rather proceed of a maidenly shamefastedness than upon any certain determination.”
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For Elizabeth, who had undergone so many wrongs and near rape at the hands of her uncle, the hapless Thomas Seymour, the future queen had learned all the brutal lessons required of a young, handsome woman that were necessary in the art of sexual politics of the sixteenth century. No man would ever become her master and make her insecure in her position. After all, the Low Countries had eventually become Spanish through the marriage of a female heir. Francis of France was now equally King of Scotland. Moreover, the lessons to be drawn from marriage could never have been very far from her conscious mind with a father like Henry VIII.
While no record remains of her intimate discussions with William Cecil, the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Shrewsbury in the early days of November 1558, these three gentlemen would have “schooled” the future queen in the secrets on the present state of preparedness of England. It was not a pretty picture. To Scotland in the North, the dowager Queen Mary of Guise, who had been ruling Scotland along with the nobles during Queen Mary’s
minority, had amassed some twenty thousand French troops on the border of England. Since 1557, the nobles had refused to fight under her banner against England, but the war continued nonetheless. From Elizabeth’s perspective, bereft of a standing English army and wholly reliant upon her northern, and mostly Catholic nobles’ men, the French troops looked more like an invasion force than a defensive one.
In the West, Ireland refused steadfastly to be subdued—either by England or by her own nobility. The country appeared to be in a state of perpetual tribal warfare, and now that Elizabeth wanted England to become a Protestant realm again, she would risk invasion from the West if the fighting in Ireland united her people against a common English Protestant enemy. It did not take her savant mathematician astronomer, John Dee, to tell Elizabeth that trouble could be fomented in Ireland by other Catholic countries like France or Spain through the provision of men or arms.
On the Continent, Philip had dragged Mary’s England into his wars with France in the Low Countries. His action against the French not only drained the English coffers of cash, but the country of able men to adequately defend its borders should Mary of England die as expected. In order to fight his war, not only had Philip impoverished his wife’s kingdom, but he had also emptied his own treasury, and was effectively bankrupt for the first time in 1557.
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Philip’s rule in the Low Countries had become downright unpopular, not only because the majority of the inhabitants of the seventeen provinces, or states, were Calvinist; but also due to Philip’s style of personal rule. Anything that was not Spanish was inferior for Philip, and the people of the Low Countries found their ancient rights eroded under what appeared to be more and more like a foreign occupation.
Yet it was the loss of Calais that represented the greatest threat to Elizabeth’s people. Not only was it catastrophic in terms of the national pride, but, more important, Calais was the primary staple town of all English merchant staple exporters, as it was where they had their wool spun. Since broadcloth was England’s principal export, made from the wool spun at Calais, trade was at an all-time low. People were starving, imports were scarce, and death rates soared from war, poor hygiene, and famine. And still, Queen
Mary’s pyres of Protestant “heretics” burned, their stench wafting throughout the realm.
In fact, the England Elizabeth was about to inherit was downright poor, torn apart by years of religious strife and war. Not only was she a woman in a man’s world, but she had been the “bastard” daughter of Henry VIII, whose dynasty held only the most tenuous claim to the throne of England.
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When or how Elizabeth had decided on her course of action should she become queen is undoubtedly the culmination of many years of statecraft instilled into her by the very life she led, and her progressive tutor, Roger Ascham. It was no accident of fate that on November 17, 1558, Elizabeth Tudor was standing under the great, ancient oak tree at Hatfield House when the royal messengers rode into the park. It is a scene that has been portrayed in most movies and books about Elizabeth, and was the first act of symbolism in her reign. For ancient oaks equated a nation’s strength and durability—the ancient Britons worshipped them. The hearts of these oaks became masts for the tall ships that would come to symbolize the greatness of the Empire by the end of her reign. When Elizabeth took the royal ring that had signified Mary’s reign and now her death, and slipped it upon her own finger, the new queen kneeled by that gnarled and storm-struck oak and said, “
A domino factum est mirabile in oculis nostris.”
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This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous to our eyes.
Division among ourselves; war with France and Scotland; The French King bestriding the realm…steadfast enmity, but no steadfast friendship abroad.
CSP—D
OMESTIC, ELIZABETH,
vol. 1. no. 66
W
ithin twenty-four hours of Elizabeth’s accession, orders had gone out to her newly formed Privy Council. On the day of Queen Mary’s death, William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, wrote and distributed a memorandum with the form of oath to be taken by the privy councillors. The following day, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton wrote to the queen that he had sequestered Cardinal Pole’s house and goods on the queen’s instructions.
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Throckmorton also confirmed that he had executed Elizabeth’s instructions to the Duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth’s uncle Thomas Howard; the Earl of Bedford, John Russell; and Lord Cobham, William Brooke. All ships at port would be confined there until a complete audit of goods, ships, and men could be established.
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By the time forty-eight hours had elapsed, Cecil had commissions and instructions for the “Lords now beyond the sea” and had orders for Thomas Gresham, the queen’s money man and arms dealer in the Low Countries.
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Elizabeth’s expectations from William Cecil were spelled out clearly in her first public speech from Hatfield on November 20, 1558:
I give you this charge, that you shall be of my Privy Council and content yourself to take pains for me and my realm. This judgment I have of you: that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift, and that you will be faithful to the state, and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel that you think best, and if you shall know anything necessary to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only. And assure yourself I
will not fail to keep taciturnity therein, and therefore herewith I charge you.
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The following day, Count Feria, Philip’s ambassador to England who had married Queen Mary’s favorite lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer, wrote to the king from Hatfield, “our lady the Queen died.”
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Then in his own private code, Feria continued:
I think your Majesty must have a copy of the will…as I have written to your Majesty it is very early yet to talk about marriage…the confusion and ineptitude of these people in all their affairs make it necessary for us to be more circumspect, so as not to miss the opportunities which are presented to us, and particularly in the matter of marriage. For this and other reasons (if there be no objection) it will be well to send me a copy of the [marriage] treaty, which, though it may not be very necessary, will at least serve to post me up as to what would be touched upon, although a new treaty would be different from the last.
The new Queen and her people hold themselves free from your Majesty and will listen to any ambassadors who may come to treat of marriage. Your Majesty understands better than I how important it is that this affair should go through your hands, which as I have said will be difficult except with great negotiation and money. I therefore wish your Majesty to keep in view all the steps to be taken on your behalf, one of them being that the Emperor should not send any ambassador here to treat of this, for it would be inconvenient enough for Ferdinand to marry here even if he took the titbit from your Majesty’s hand, but very much worse if it were arranged in any other way. For the present, I know for certain they will not hear the name of the duke of Savoy mentioned as they fear he will want to recover his estates with English forces and will keep them constantly at war. I am very pleased to see that the nobles are all beginning to open their eyes to the fact that it will not do to marry this woman in the country itself.
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By the end of November, Elizabeth’s Privy Council had been formed save the office of lord keeper, which was eventually taken up by William Cecil’s brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, in January
1559.
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A nationwide audit of men and arms was under way for one purpose in mind: to assess how empty the queen’s coffers were and how in the devil she could secure her borders.
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At the same time, letters were fired off in rapid succession to potential sources of ready cash. On November 27, Cecil wrote on behalf of the Privy Council to London’s “lord mayor, Aldermen and Common Council…for the sealing of certain bands for the taking up of divers sums of money at Antwerp for the Queen’s Majesty by Thomas Gresham, her Highness’s Agent there.”
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This was followed up with another letter to the lord mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council to plead for the City of London’s merchants in helping to secure funds in Flanders.
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No one in England was more acutely aware of the precariousness of her position than Elizabeth herself. For her Catholic population, Mary Queen of Scots held a better claim to the throne as the great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his eldest daughter, Margaret, who was born before Henry VIII. The maternal uncles of Mary Queen of Scots, the powerful French Guise family, ruled Scotland by virtue of the Queen Mother’s regency in the name of the French crown, and the common plaint among privy councillors was that Henry II, the French king, was “bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland.”
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This simple fact made the urgency for a religious settlement that could be acceptable to both English Protestants and Catholics essential. Even the Venetian ambassador wrote back to the Doges that the English would be well able “to resist any invasion from abroad, providing there be union within the kingdom.”
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