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

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СКАЧАТЬ However, that spring Henry’s mind turned to the fundamental issue of securing the Tudor dynasty. Perhaps he was beginning to realize that his god-like being was mortal after all. Hugely obese and in failing health, he suffered excruciating pain from a chronically ulcerated leg. In June, Parliament formally restored Mary and then Elizabeth to the succession, to follow their half-brother Edward. However, Henry did not choose at the same time to reinstate the legitimacy of both his daughters, leaving them with a fundamental insecurity and vulnerability to counterclaims on their throne.

      At this point it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would ever become Queen of England, but her restoration to the succession made the dream at least possible. Aged nearly ten, this clever, watchful, ambitious girl was no longer a child and was beginning instead to think about her own destiny. She was uncritically adoring of her distant father and grateful for the warmth and authority of her new stepmother, Catherine Parr, a mature and intelligent woman who was herself avid for education and self-improvement. That summer Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary had been summoned to court to meet the young widow and then attended as special guests the sixth and last wedding of their father. Closer to him than she had ever been previously, Elizabeth’s most vivid memories of Henry as a father and king would date from these last three years of his life when the turmoil of his private life was over and he turned once more to engage in self-aggrandisement abroad. Ill-judged and costly as these grandiose schemes may have been, they energized the ageing king with something of the charismatic vitality and splendour of his youth.

      It is impossible to know what Elizabeth knew of her father’s military campaigns against both their Scottish neighbours and the French in the summer of 1544. But he was in her thoughts when, on the last day of July, she wrote her first extant letter, to her stepmother Catherine Parr, and ended this exercise in courtly Italian with the sentiments: ‘I humbly entreat your most excellent highness that in writing to his majesty you will deign to recommend me to him, entreating ever his sweet benediction and likewise entreating the Lord God to send him best success in gaining victory over his enemies, so that your highness, and I together with you, may rejoice the sooner at his happy return.’⁴¹ Elizabeth was living at St James’s Palace, immersed in her books and study, reading and translating from Latin and Greek the stories of classical battles and mythic heroes. While she laboured at home, her own flesh and blood hero Henry was so revivified by war that he led the siege of Boulogne himself in a last gesture of defiance against the French, his doctors and the approach of death. Eventually he entered the city in triumph in the middle of September. For that moment, perhaps, he felt he had turned back the years.

      Elizabeth was at Leeds Castle in Kent to welcome him home, an awe-inspiring father and, it would seem to her then, a Hercules among men. Although when she was queen she was to choose equivocation and peace rather than confrontation and war, all her life Elizabeth was to consider it as the highest compliment to be likened to him, the man she loved and admired more than anyone; ‘my own matchless and most kind father’.⁴² The king she saw in the last years was an ageing old lion but in his young daughter Elizabeth’s opinion, he was ‘a king, whom philosophers regard as god on earth’.⁴³

      As queen she was to invoke the glorious reputation of her father whenever she felt at all defensive as a woman with her all-male government ranged against her, or facing military aggression from abroad: ‘though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had’,⁴⁴ she was to tell her Lords in November 1566, when she was thirty-three and still angrily resisting their pressure to marry or otherwise settle the succession. And writing to her father at the time of his ‘Rough Wooing’ when she herself was only twelve years old, Elizabeth claimed not only kinship with her ‘illustrious and most mighty’ father but also an intimate intellectual and personal bond with him: ‘May I, by this means [the trilingual translation of her stepmother Catherine Parr’s book of prayers], be indebted to you not as an imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them.’⁴⁵ It took courage and confidence in this girl to place herself on a par with her father, a distant figure of gigantic proportions and terrifying reputation, a tyrant and a divinely ordained king.

      Her public identification was always with her heroic father, but in private it seems Elizabeth honoured the memory of her mother too. At some point in her life she began to wear a diamond, ruby and mother of pearl ring with a secret compartment which revealed a portrait of Anne, face to face with a companion miniature of her daughter. They folded together when the ring was closed. The vilification of Anne’s reputation and the disputed legality of her marriage, together with the dangerous imputations of witchcraft, incest and depravity attached to her name, meant Elizabeth’s attempt at some identification and intimacy with her mother was necessarily secretive. She did show, however, interest and sympathy for her Boleyn relations, promoting her cousin, Henry Carey, Mary Boleyn’s son, to the baronetcy of Hunsdon. Anne may not have been publicly celebrated by her daughter but she was not forgotten.

      Although Boulogne was a short-lived victory for Henry and virtually bankrupted his country, it did a great deal for the old king’s morale and his people’s insular pride. Knowing once more the thrill of conquest he could forget the years of domestic frustration and impotence. Scotland and the baby queen were to be casualties of his new energy and belligerence, for he was determined to force the marriage of his heir with Mary, Scotland’s queen. By the autumn of 1545, Henry was furious at the Scots’ continued recalcitrance and once again unleashed his warlord, the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour. While the almost three-year-old Mary was kept in close confinement by her mother at Stirling Castle, the marauding English rode over the border to burn and destroy crops and towns and particularly the abbeys and religious establishments. Kelso Abbey, Melrose Abbey, and the abbeys of Dryburgh and Jedburgh were all put to the torch, and their inhabitants and the surrounding populace dispersed or killed. As great a destruction as possible was wreaked on the fair and fertile valleys between these towns as Hertford and his troops swept through on their vengeance raids. It was harvest time and Henry wanted the Scots to reap their bitterest for spurning the English alliance.

      Henry’s counterproductive ‘Rough Wooing’ was to be continued even more ruthlessly after his death in 1547 by Edward Seymour, now the Lord Protector of Edward’s reign. The baby Scottish queen had grown into a bonny child, intelligent and charming who, having outlived the extreme perils of infancy and risks of neonatal disease, now had to face the dangers of her predatory neighbour. So important was it for England to secure Scotland as insurance against her Continental enemies that Somerset remained intent on prising Mary away from her mother and her country to ensure her alliance with the young English king, himself not yet ten years old. On 10 September 1547, a day that became known in Scottish annals as ‘Black Saturday’, Somerset’s troops routed the Scots under Arran’s ineffectual command at Pinkie Cleugh near Inveresk. Once more the flower of Scottish nobility was slain or taken prisoner. Once again the Earl of Arran managed to escape unscathed from the bloody destruction of the best of Scotland’s fighting men.

      This latest defeat was so devastating that Mary of Guise feared that even Stirling Castle, that great bulwark against attack, might not be able to protect her daughter from the English. Lord Erskine, one of the queen’s guardians, and a man already grieving the loss of his son at Pinkie, suggested he take the precious child into safekeeping and install her on the nearby island of Inchmahome, where the secluded Augustinian priory there was surrounded by the deep waters of the Lake of Menteith. Although Mary was not yet five years old and was only to stay for two to three weeks, the stealth and urgency of her departure from Stirling and the mysterious atmosphere and beauty of the place may well have impressed her with a visceral memory of excitement and tension.

      Perhaps at this impressionable age Mary’s natural polarity of impetuous courage and nervous sensibility thus was etched deeper in her developing psyche. The atmosphere of isolation and meditation on the mysterious СКАЧАТЬ