Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ She had been alone and without powerful protectors and had learnt patience, circumspection, discipline and the absolute necessity of command. She had also discovered the extent of her own courage and the coolness of her intellect under fire. This gave her a special confidence, proof against any challenge to come. The whole purpose of her life was to inherit what was rightfully hers; the daughter most like her father who most deserved his crown. And she meant to rule like a king. Everything else was secondary to that desire. Yet the question of her own legitimacy, denied by the Catholic powers, upheld by her own people, was an ever-present liability.

      Although ambitious men would seek her all her life for dynastic alliances, Elizabeth, from a very young age, had rejected the orthodoxy that a woman must marry, that a princess, particularly, had a duty to marry. Given all the human and political circumstances of tradition, expectation, security, and dynastic and familial duty which pressed in upon her, Elizabeth’s insistence that she would not marry was a remarkable instance of revolutionary action and independence of mind. In May 1558, she reminded Sir Thomas Pope that even when Edward VI was king she had asked permission ‘to remayne in that estate I was, which of all others best lyked me or pleased me … I am even at this present of the same mind … I so well like this estate, as I perswade myselfe ther is not anie kynde of liffe comparable unto it … no, though I were offered the greatest Prince in all Europe.’¹¹ To remain unwed was also a masterly diplomatic ploy for the unfulfilled prospect of her marriage to various foreign princes kept the equilibrium between the great European powers in constant suspension.

      Part of this determination had to be as a result of experience and contemplation. She was twenty-five and had been through a rigorous training for something much greater than submission to a husband in marriage and sharing her monarchic power with a prince. She had her sister Mary’s sad example in near memory; her father’s ruinous effect on the women he married as a more distant example. Yet to remain unmarried flew in the face of the pleas of her increasingly desperate councillors. Almost every parliament included a petition that she should marry. For a monarch so insistent on her primary concern for her people it seemed perverse to persist in celibacy and risk at her death the eclipse of the Tudors and the possibility of civil war.

      But to remain unmarried also flouted the hierarchical order of life which kept the nation safe, the universe in harmony. If Elizabeth continued to ignore the immutable laws of interconnectedness and the due place of everything, including herself and her rights and responsibilities as a monarch, then she risked the catastrophe of chaos. In the first years of her reign, her bishops of Canterbury, London and Ely expressed a similar fear ‘that this continued sterility in your Highness’ person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’.¹² In this decision Elizabeth confounded every shade of opinion. She stood alone and unsupported. How could she not sometimes have faltered?

      As the year drew to its wintry close, the opportunity Elizabeth had barely hoped for all her life was hers at last. By the beginning of November it became clear that her sister Mary was mortally ill. The swelling in her belly which she had prayed so desperately was a growing child was most probably ovarian or uterine cancer. As Mary slipped in and out of consciousness the courtiers who had danced attendance at her door melted away. They joined the hasty ride from London towards Hatfield, ready to ally themselves to the new source of power and patronage. All her life Elizabeth was to remember her unease at this precipitate turning from the dying monarch to court the coming one.

      And she was the coming queen. She was Henry’s legal heir, after the deaths of Edward and Mary, as declared by the succession statute of 1544. There was, however, the small matter of an earlier statute when her father had declared her and Mary ‘preclosed, excluded, and barred to the claim’.¹³ This remained unrepealed, although Mary had taken steps to legitimize herself. Elizabeth chose to rely on the 1544 statute for her legitimacy, but the insecurity she felt when faced with the claim of her cousin Mary Stuart remained. She was however the popular choice, the only choice as far as the people were concerned. The dying Mary had even given her blessing, urged on by Philip of Spain, who feared Protestantism less than the imperial ambitions of France. She had sent two members of her council to Elizabeth to let her know ‘it was her intention to bequeath to her the royal crown, together with all the dignity that she was then in possession of by right of inheritance’. Elizabeth’s reply illustrated partly why the long-suffering Mary found her younger sister so exasperating to deal with: ‘I am very sorry to hear of the Queen’s illness; but there is no reason why I should thank her for her intention to give me the crown of this kingdom. For she has neither the power of bestowing it upon me, nor can I lawfully be deprived of it, since it is my peculiar and hereditary right.’¹⁴

      So it was that on the 17 November 1558, a Thursday, Elizabeth learned the waiting was over and her father’s crown was finally hers. She sank to her knees, apparently momentarily overcome, breathing deeply with emotion. But with the breadth of her learning and her cool self-possession she was not long lost for words: ‘A domino factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis meis!’ was her first utterance as queen. Quoting part of Psalm 118 she had declared, ‘This is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in my eyes.’¹⁵

Fortuitously Parliament happened to be sitting that day, and when the Lords were brought the news of Mary’s death, in measured tones ‘with joint consent of the whole assembly’ they declared ‘the Lady Elizabeth might forthwith be proclaimed Queen’.¹⁶ This was broadcast by the herald-at-arms at the front door of the Palace of Westminster, at the cross in Cheapside and at other prominent places in the city. Weary of bloodshed, fearful of foreign wars, weakened by bad harvests and disease, the people welcomed the new queen. But there was foreboding too as to what the future would bring. Another female monarch, after the last disastrous experiment, seemed to be too risky when England was in need of inspired and powerful leadership. There was a profound cultural and religious acceptance that it was unnatural, indeed impossible, for women to be successfully in command. But the prospect of marriage for Elizabeth also brought the real fear, acted out in Mary’s reign, of alliance with a dominant foreign power. It was not surprising there were mixed emotions beyond the general feeling of relief. Sir John Hayward,^* an early historian, wrote: ‘Generally, the rich were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed doubtful, the discontented and the desperate, and all such whose desires were both immoderate and evil, joyful, as wishing trouble, the gate of spoil.’¹⁷

      And trouble was what everyone expected. The transition from old monarch to new was inherently uncertain. Diplomatically too, it upset the status quo between nations. The death of a stalwart Catholic during a period of fomenting religious debate changed the tensions between the ancient neighbours and rivals, France, Spain, Scotland and England.

The fiery Scottish Protestant John Knox was also to remember 1558 as a year of particular significance. His tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published, with unfortunate timing, just as Elizabeth came to the throne. By monstrous regiment he meant unnatural government and his blast was directed against the women rulers in Europe at the time of his writing whom he saw as implacable enemies of the reformed religion: Mary I of England and the Scottish regent Mary of Guise.^* Unfortunately, the new Queen of England who could have been his most powerful ally was instead greatly offended. She did not find it amusing to be hectored in his main argument: ‘to promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any Realm is repugnant to Nature; contrary to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally, it is the subversion of all good Order, of all equity and justice’.СКАЧАТЬ