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

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СКАЧАТЬ untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!

      Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 3

      IF THE RIVALRY BETWEEN these two queens would only be resolved through death, the individual significance of their births had a certain symmetry too. Both entered the world as bitter disappointments to their fathers, and the birth of each princess was a contributory factor in the untimely death of a parent. It was all a matter of sex. Both fathers were kings without legitimate male heirs. Had Elizabeth not been a girl but the longed-for, expected prince it is most unlikely that her mother would ever have been executed. It is even possible that Henry’s popular reputation might have rested more on his Reformation, encouraged by his independent-minded reformist Queen Anne, than on his grotesque failures as a husband and father.

In the case of Mary Queen of Scots, her birth in 1542 was followed almost immediately by her father’s death. Already sick and humiliated, James V, on hearing his heir was a girl, literally turned his face to the wall like a wounded animal, and waited to die. His valedictory words showed him defeated as much by fate as by life: looking back two centuries to Marjorie Bruce, founder of the Stewart dynasty, he reputedly said to the messenger bringing the news of Mary’s birth: ‘It cam’ wi’ a lass, it will gang wi’ a lass.’¹ In fact, James was as poor a prophet as he was survivor. He died aged only thirty and without seeing his daughter and heir. The Stuart^* dynasty, however, managed to teeter on for a further century, despite revolution and republicanism, although Scotland’s absolute independence did not survive the reign of his daughter Mary.

      Nine years separated these two princesses, born in neighbouring kingdoms in an outlying island of Europe. England and Scotland were small and relatively unimportant, impoverished lands, mostly under threat from the many times larger and richer Continental powers of France and Spain, and spasmodically at war with them, and with each other. The newly established and insecure Tudor dynasty was in urgent need of a male heir; the Stewarts, although an ancient race of kings, were ill-fated, desperate for a monarch who could survive to middle age and produce a strong male heir. The last five Scottish kings had been children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.)

      The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered and James II, a murderer himself, was blown up while watching his own cannon being fired) and they were undermined by the subsequent power of factious regents and murderous clan rivalry. When they eventually succeeded at the start of the seventeenth century to the English throne and moved south, their life expectancy improved. The dynasty’s star, however, continued as mismanaged and bloody as ever it was in earlier centuries, with both Mary and her grandson, Charles I, tried and beheaded for treason.

      Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 to a father who was already forty-one and who had longed for a healthy son during the twenty-three years of his marriage to the unimpeachable Catherine of Aragon. In despair at producing only one surviving child, Mary, born in 1516 (his other three sons and two daughters were either stillborn or died soon after birth), Henry began to wonder if somehow his lack of male heirs was not a personal punishment by God. He looked across to France at his main rival, François I, a chivalrous and extravagant Renaissance king whose reign of thirty-two years corresponded with Henry’s so closely that they even died within two months of each other, in 1547. Henry identified with this athletic, popular, resplendent monarch whose procreative vitality seemed gallingly superior to his own. François’s fragile Queen Claude had managed to produce seven live children, three of them sons, before herself dying of exhaustion at twenty-four.

      In an age of superstition and magic, where God’s agency and the spirit world controlled the elements and directed daily lives, barrenness, and the lack of a son as heir, was never just a matter of chance. There was an uneasiness in kingdoms without male heirs that somehow the natural order of things had been disrupted and disappointment, rupture and discord would ensue. To continue the quote at the head of the chapter of the speech which Shakespeare gave Ulysses on the essential patterning of the universe:

      The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,

      Observe degree, priority, and place,

      Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

      Office, and custom, in all line of order:

      And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

      In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d

      Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye

      Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,

      And posts, like the commandment of a king,

      Sans check, to good and bad.

      In such a closely ordered world where everything had a reason, and that usually a supernatural one, Henry feared that his virtually barren marriage indicated he had transgressed some article of holy writ. The words of Leviticus particularly troubled him: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’² Had he not done precisely that in marrying Catherine, the widow of his elder brother Arthur? But Henry was also an opportunist. Although conservative and orthodox in his own religious beliefs he cannot have failed to give thought to the Continental reformers whose disdain for the pope and evangelical zeal for an individual faith drawn directly from the Gospels gave him a different approach to his own immutable church. His troubled conscience, however, his questioning of a possibly invalid marriage, were made all the more insistent by the fact that Henry had long ago tired of his wife and found a determined replacement in an attractive, nubile, lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. It was significant that this clever woman was part of the radical religious faction at court and her own conversation was as tantalising to the king as her physical charms.

      Emotionally, Henry was a crass and simple man. He could be handled by any adept and resolute woman who managed to withhold from him something he desired. For more than six years Anne drew him close and reeled him out. At times he was driven almost to distraction by her seductive manner combined with her steadfast refusal to become his mistress. Henry had already produced a bastard son by Elizabeth Blount, a boy he was fond of and ennobled as Duke of Richmond and Somerset. But the prize Anne held out to the king was a legitimate son and heir. The longing to secure the succession with a male heir propelled him to marry again. So Henry put in train the momentous events which led him to sweep aside the Catholic Church and proclaim himself supreme head of the newly established Church of England. Spurred on by fear and desire, Henry drove this pragmatic revolution through Parliament. He had the support of the Protestant apologist Thomas Cranmer and his tireless executor Thomas Cromwell. His immovable Lord Chancellor Thomas More, however, paid with his life.

      By the beginning of 1533, however, Anne Boleyn’s long game seemed to have paid off triumphantly. Showing remarkable self-confidence and independence of mind, she had refused the considerable honour of becoming the king’s mistress (having first been married off for propriety’s sake to a compliant nobleman). She had the presence of mind and the boldness to play for the much higher stakes of becoming his queen. This really was a remarkable ambition given that there was already a genuinely popular possessor of that title in Queen Catherine, and divorce was not an obvious or easy option. It suggested a woman of will and vision who, through force of character, could impart that vision to others. Certainly she did not appear overawed by her evident destiny, believing that God had elevated her to this high estate in a divine intervention of a personal kind: she told the Venetian ambassador that God ‘had inspired his Majesty to СКАЧАТЬ