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

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СКАЧАТЬ city with cheers and blessings in her ears. The extraordinary emotion of the day was like a common exhalation of the anxiety and fear of the last years replaced with an inspiration of hope for what was to come: ‘some with plausible acclamations, some with sober prayers, and many with silent and true-hearted teares, which were then seen to melt from their eyes’.⁵⁰

      The ancient ritual and solemnity of the coronation on the following day, a Sunday, was charged with even greater moment by the question everyone at home and abroad wanted answered: how would Elizabeth’s preferences on religion be revealed?

      Nowhere was this more keenly monitored than in France where Henri II, with his eye firmly on his daughter-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, and the opportunity she presented of further advancing his empire, was attempting to enlist the pope as a powerful ally in his plan to outlaw Elizabeth and annex England. The grandest of Spanish ambassadors was Count de Feria who, in his report to Philip II, saw nothing but doom to Spanish hopes, to the world, if France got its way. ‘Whenever the King of France finds means in Rome to get this woman declared a heretic, together with her bas-tardy, and advances his own claim’,⁵¹ Feria believed, France would be able to walk into England, so debilitated was its exchequer and so disabled by having yet another woman ruler, this time of dubious legitimacy. All the French needed was the pope’s authority assuring the support of the English Catholics and the seductive substitute queen, Mary Stuart, as the rightful heir: already he had the one and was working on providing the other.

      Elizabeth and all her court made the journey from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey on foot. The great church, rebuilt by Henry III as a soaring monument to faith three centuries before, dominated the skyline and drew thousands of the new queen’s subjects from the grandest to the lowliest to witness and participate in this ancient rite. Elizabeth walked in procession to her coronation along a carpet of purple cloth which seemed to melt like snow and disappear the moment her feet had passed, as the crowd grabbed what they could, tearing and cutting it away, for any scrap as a memento of this auspicious day.

      Tall and slim, Elizabeth followed the procession of lords and ladies of the court and her bishops, her face pale, her hair worn loose and unadorned over her shoulders as a symbol of virginity. As she arrived at the abbey all the church bells in the city were ringing out in a clamour of celebration. Then Elizabeth mounted the high platform raised in front of the altar that exhibited her clearly to everyone and the question was asked of the people whether they wished to have her as their queen. The roared ‘YES’ was followed by a cacophony of ‘organs, fifes, trumpets, and drums playing, the bells also ringing, it seemed as if the world were come to an end’.⁵²

      The coronation Mass proceeded to its centuries-old pattern of prayer and elaborate ritual lasting several hours, with Bishop Oglethorpe of Carlisle officiating. Resplendent on her throne, Elizabeth retained all aspects of the ceremony and Mass, except for the crucial elevation of the Host. This was a rite which she had already made clear was distasteful to her; she had ordered once before the same bishop to desist from elevating the Host at his Christmas Day mass and when he had refused she had withdrawn from the service.⁵³ Now at her coronation, when the Host was elevated, with all the concomitant meanings of transubstantiation, a doctrine considered clearly idolatrous by the Protestant reformers, the queen once more withdrew. She only returned to her throne once the offending ritual was over.

      There was one other modification that would have given her bishops and their Catholic supporters pause for thought. At the end of the coronation ceremony itself, just prior to the Mass, the monarch accepted a ritual homage from her bishops and peers. Traditionally the archbishops headed the queue in order of seniority, followed by the bishops and then the lords. This was the order followed by Elizabeth’s father and the founder of the dynasty, her grandfather Henry VII. It was also followed closely by her sister Mary. Her brother Edward, however, accepted homage first from the Protector, the Duke of Somerset, followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and then all the bishops and peers together with no distinction between his lords temporal or spiritual. Elizabeth instituted a significant change in accepting homage first from her officiating bishop but ‘then the Lordes went up to her Grace kneeling upon their knees and kissed her Grace. And after the Lordes had done, the Bishops came one after another kneeling and kissing her Grace.’⁵⁴ This was a clear message to her bishops, and the church they represented, not to take their pre-eminence for granted.

      The news travelled fast to her Continental neighbours. The Count de Feria, always full of foreboding and implacable in his dislike and suspicion of the English and ‘that woman’ wrote to Philip of Spain in outrage and a sense of doom: ‘I had been told that the Queen [the following continued in cipher] took the holy sacrament sub utraque specie [both wine and bread] on the day of the coronation, but it was all nonsense. She did not take it.’⁵⁵ His spirits were lowered further when Elizabeth told him she resented the amount of money that flowed out of the country yearly for the pope’s use and that she considered her bishops to be ‘lazy poltroons’.⁵⁶ It did not need a Dr Dee to divine that change was going to come.

      Mary, along with her father-in-law Henri and her own Guise family, was increasingly concerned about the growing strength of the reformed religion in France and the inevitable factions and unrest. A desultory peace process between Spain, France and England had already begun before Elizabeth’s accession to the throne and this progressed slowly throughout the early months of her reign. Mary wrote to her mother with some of her anxieties: ‘We were hoping for a peace but that is still so uncertain … God grant it all turns out well.’⁵⁷

      The greatest stumbling block in the peace negotiations between France and England was the emotive question of Calais. This was not helped by the insolence of the French negotiators who had stated initially: ‘that they knew not how to conclude a peace with the Queen’s majesty, nor to whom they should deliver Calais, but to the dolphin’s wife, [Mary Queen of Scots] whom they took for Queen of England’.⁵⁸ Elizabeth’s Minister of State William Cecil, who had noted this insult in a report written in his own hand, On the Weighty Matter of Scotland, was also concerned by Mary’s manner towards Elizabeth, revealed ‘by her own disdainful speech to diverse persons’.⁵⁹ The young Scottish queen’s disparagement of her older cousin was not confined to her acolytes at court but rashly had been expressed to some of Elizabeth’s own gentlewomen in France. Mary’s impetuous nature and political naivety had already begun to store up trouble for her in the fast evolving dynamic between the two queens.

      As Elizabeth left the abbey on her coronation day as Queen of England, wearing her heavy robe of cloth of gold and carrying her orb and sceptre in each hand, she was greeted by the clamour of the crowds, their voices and their musical instruments sounding, and all the city’s church bells ringing. Young, alone, and with her ministers and court processing behind her, she seemed in no way overwhelmed by the solemnity and significance of the occasion. On the contrary, she was beaming so broadly, greeting everyone who greeted her, shouting witticisms back to the crowd, sharing her delight with her exuberant subjects to such an extent that at least one of her foreign, Catholic observers looked on with disapproval: ‘in my opinion she exceeded the grounds of gravity and decorum’.⁶⁰

      It was remarkable indeed that Elizabeth, still young and quite inexperienced, should exhibit such confidence and revel so obviously in the acquisition of power. Her animal high spirits naturally reciprocated her own subjects’ ebullience, and they loved her for it. In fact her ability to СКАЧАТЬ