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

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СКАЧАТЬ was her cousin, but her marital prospects in 1543 were much more dazzling. For Mary was already a regnant queen while Elizabeth’s chances of inheriting the crown, having been bastardized and disinherited by her father, seemed very remote. It was traditional that the kingdom with the misfortune to be ruled by a queen was considered part of her dowry in the marriage negotiations. The future dispensation of Scotland, therefore, made Mary’s tiny, oblivious form the immediate focus of her ambitious neighbour. Elizabeth’s father, the ageing bully Henry, was determined to annex Scotland and prevent for ever his old enemy France from getting a base from which to invade England. He meant to claim the infant Mary as a wife for his five-year-old son, Edward.

      On 12 October 1537 Henry had at last been awarded his prince and heir after marrying his third wife, Jane Seymour, within eleven days of the execution of the second. The eruption of happiness in court and country was crowned with the baby’s magnificent christening later that October. Elizabeth, just four years old, was carried to the ceremony by Edward Seymour, uncle to the new prince. The elder of the ambitious brothers of the queen, Edward Seymour was to become Lord Protector on Henry’s death, the most powerful nobleman in the land.

      But the birth of a male heir came at a high cost. After a gruelling three-day labour, Queen Jane was dead in less than a fortnight of a postpartum sepsis. She died in the midst of her triumph aged only twenty-eight. Henry seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken, writing to François I of France, ‘Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of death of her who brought me this happiness.’²⁶

      However, the monarch’s round of marriages, alliances and wars continued with barely a pause. And so, five years later, when his old Scottish adversary, James V, died in the winter of 1542 with a sole female heir, just five years younger than the English male heir, it appeared to Henry to be a God-sent opportunity. The Spanish ambassador considered it a possible double boon for Henry, for the ageing king was in need of a wife himself, caught in an unusual marital lacuna between Catherine Howard, whom he had just executed for adultery, and Catherine Parr, whom he had yet to woo. Certainly, for those with any memory, there was a certain justice in the possibility of Henry finally winning the admirable, and fertile, Mary of Guise, having lost her the first time to his nephew James of Scotland. Such a marriage would have brought the baby Queen of Scots into closest sisterhood with Elizabeth, most probably sharing a similar education and upbringing in England. How different her future would have been. But the idea of marrying the dowager queen did not appear to fire Henry’s imagination as it had five years before.

      The marriage of his heir to Scotland’s heir was a much more rewarding enterprise. Henry wanted to get his hands on this intractable kingdom and there was no easier way, it would seem, than through such a marriage alliance. The fact that the English provided the male side of the bargain ensured England’s natural superiority in any union with Scotland, just as a husband had dominion over his wife. From the English point of view there was something right and natural about uniting these two sea-bound kingdoms, with England as the senior partner. Such a marriage of neighbours would annex Scotland in an expansion of Henry’s own house and territory and thereby reduce the attrition on the border and, more seriously, close the back door to France.

      Needless to say, Scotland, with a real pride in her own ancient history and fiercely protected independence, saw the situation rather differently. There was also the small matter of how revenues were raised and where they were spent: ‘if both the realms were under one, all should go to the King of England out of the country of Scotland not to be spent there, whereby Scotland now being poor already should be utterly beggared and undone’.²⁷ But Henry had a fistful of Scottish noblemen captured at Solway Moss, whom he would treat well, bribe with money and promises of patronage, and return to Scotland to work on his behalf to facilitate the marriage contract. Ten of these signed a secret pact recognizing Henry as King of Scotland should Mary Queen of Scots die without an heir.²⁸ This was a shameful precursor of the secret treaty Mary herself, when a young woman, was to sign with the Guises and the French King Henri II, ceding Scotland to France in the event of her death without issue.

      Initially there were fears for the baby queen’s survival: ‘a very weak child and not like to live’.²⁹ Even two weeks after her birth, Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, was writing that not only the child but the mother too was expected to die. However, the frail baby did thrive and by March the following year, Henry’s ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, had travelled north to oversee the marital negotiations and examine the prize himself.

      Sadler, a loyal but literal-minded man, was shown into the presence of the dowager queen, Mary of Guise. After discussing the marriage proposals, Mary led Sadler to the nursery to see the new queen. The baby Queen of Scots was not yet four months old. Her mother asked the nurse to unwrap her and show her quite naked for Sadler’s approval. Sadler, a fond husband and father himself, seemed touched and impressed by the sight: ‘I assure your majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God,’ he reported back to Henry.³⁰

      Sadler’s conversations with Mary of Guise and with Arran, the regent, were doggedly relayed back to his master in meticulous letters of epic length which make them an invaluable source of information, conveyed with an immediacy which transcends more than four and a half centuries of intervening history. Sadler was ever puzzled as to whom he should trust. Mary of Guise was charming, intelligent and a skilful stateswoman. She was quite capable of dissembling when need be. Mary gave the impression that the King of England’s plans for her daughter were exactly what she would have hoped, and Sadler was naturally credulous. But Arran had warned him, ‘that I should find her in the end (whatsoever she pretendeth) a right French woman’, with her main motive to keep England at bay and the ancient Scottish alliance with her own country strong.

      No one could fail to appreciate the incongruous weight of responsibility which had fallen to this unwitting infant. She was already queen in name. One day she would have to become queen in deed of a kingdom of proud, disputatious clans centred on ancient tribal strongholds spread out across a sparsely populated, mostly mountainous, beautiful but inhospitable land. And as Mary lay in her cradle the factions were already entrenched in their rivalries, working for their own advancement and against their foes.

      The immediate struggle for influence was between Cardinal Beaton, a powerful, worldly, pro-French ally of Mary of Guise, and the Earl of Arran, a vacillating opportunist and the leader of the pro-English tendency. Arran won the first round by wresting the regency from the churchman and declaring himself, as a Hamilton, next in line to the throne after Mary. But even these allegiances were not as they seemed, for Arran was rumoured to be intending to marry his own son to the new queen, and thereby doubly ensure his family’s hold on the crown. This meant that, despite being in the pay of Henry, he was unlikely to be working to promote the English king’s ambitions. On hearing this, Henry decided to offer his daughter Elizabeth to Arran for his son: in return Arran was expected to support the marriage proposal that really mattered to Henry, that between his heir Edward and the baby Queen of Scots.

      Elizabeth was nine years old at the time, serious, highly intelligent and so well educated that those who met her inevitably remarked on her evident abilities. When she was only six years old her father’s courtier, soon to be secretary, Wriothsley was struck by the small girl’s grace and presence of mind: having been offered the king’s blessing, Elizabeth gave her humble thanks and then ‘[asked] after His Majesty’s welfare, and that with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old’.³¹ Yet at the age of nine, Elizabeth was unlikely to have been informed of her father’s offer of herself in marriage to Arran’s son, a mere compensation in the hopes that the real prize, Elizabeth’s new cousin, Mary, would be saved for Henry’s grander scheme. But her impromptu СКАЧАТЬ