Elizabeth I Read online

  Helen Castor

  * * *

  ELIZABETH I

  A Study in Insecurity

  Contents

  Genealogical Table

  ELIZABETH I

  Introduction: The Lady Elizabeth, 1533–1547

  1. Much Suspected, 1547–1558

  2. ‘Time hath brought me hither’, 1558–1570

  3. Continue Her Delays, 1570–1587

  4. Semper Eadem, 1587–1603

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Penguin Monarchs

  THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

  Athelstan Tom Holland

  Aethelred the Unready Richard Abels

  Cnut Ryan Lavelle

  THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

  William I Marc Morris

  William II John Gillingham

  Henry I Edmund King

  Stephen Carl Watkins

  Henry II Richard Barber

  Richard I Thomas Asbridge

  John Nicholas Vincent

  THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

  Henry III Stephen Church

  Edward I Andy King

  Edward II Christopher Given-Wilson

  Edward III Jonathan Sumption

  Richard II Laura Ashe

  THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

  Henry IV Catherine Nall

  Henry V Anne Curry

  Henry VI James Ross

  Edward IV A. J. Pollard

  Edward V Thomas Penn

  Richard III Rosemary Horrox

  THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

  Henry VII Sean Cunningham

  Henry VIII John Guy

  Edward VI Stephen Alford

  Mary I John Edwards

  Elizabeth I Helen Castor

  THE HOUSE OF STUART

  James I Thomas Cogswell

  Charles I Mark Kishlansky

  [Cromwell David Horspool]

  Charles II Clare Jackson

  James II David Womersley

  William III & Mary II Jonathan Keates

  Anne Richard Hewlings

  THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

  George I Tim Blanning

  George II Norman Davies

  George III Amanda Foreman

  George IV Stella Tillyard

  William IV Roger Knight

  Victoria Jane Ridley

  THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

  Edward VII Richard Davenport-Hines

  George V David Cannadine

  Edward VIII Piers Brendon

  George VI Philip Ziegler

  Elizabeth II Douglas Hurd

  For Ken, who is exactly perfectly right

  Englishmen, you say that there

  A single wolf cannot be found:

  No. But you have there a she-wolf,

  Worse by far than a million.

  French verse, 1587

  … it is all the hurt that evil men can do to noble women and princes, to spread abroad lies and dishonourable tales of them, and that we of all princes that be women are subject to be slandered wrongfully of them that be our adversaries, other hurt they cannot do to us.

  Catherine de’ Medici, 1572

  Introduction

  The Lady Elizabeth

  1533–1547

  On the morning of Friday 19 May 1536, a woman in a grey silk gown climbed a newly built wooden scaffold within the precincts of the Tower of London. She spoke a few words to the large crowd that pressed silently around the platform, then removed her gable headdress and tucked her dark hair into a cap to expose her slender neck. She knelt, and one of her attendants tied a blindfold around her fine dark eyes. Sightless now, she asked God to have pity on her soul, repeating the prayer over and over. The man holding a sword behind her shifted slightly, and then, in one swift motion, severed her head from her body.1

  Until two days before she died, Anne Boleyn had been Queen of England. On 17 May the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced her three-year marriage to Henry VIII null and void. It was an annulment which made a legal nonsense of the trumped-up charges of adultery on which she had just been tried and convicted, but so clear was it that the king required both her death and the public erasure of their union that no one dared point out the incompatibility of the two verdicts. Still, she remained Marquis of Pembroke, the first woman to have been raised to the peerage in her own right, back in 1532, when the king had wanted nothing more than to marry her. Now, on this May morning, she became the first English noblewoman, and the first anointed queen, to die at the executioner’s hand. It was a shocking moment; and it left her only child facing a frighteningly unpredictable future.

  Elizabeth was not yet three. When she was born at Greenwich Palace on 7 September 1533, her sex had been a disappointment to her parents, who had confidently expected God to give them a boy to vindicate Henry’s repudiation of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the mother of his daughter Mary. Nevertheless, Elizabeth had been proclaimed ‘Princess of England’,2 heir to her father’s throne (for the time being at least, until the day when her mother should give him a son). Since it had proved necessary for Henry to reject the authority of the pope in order to annul his marriage to Catherine and marry Anne, the baby girl was also the living embodiment of the religious revolution through which her father became, in 1534, Supreme Head of an independent Church of England.

  That new title and new Church remained, but Anne had not provided Henry with a prince. As the king began to cast around for reasons why the woman with whom he had once been obsessed might not in fact be the queen God intended for him, her enemies set to work to find some. And when Anne fell, Elizabeth’s status was drastically altered. The declaration that her parents’ marriage had never been valid left her a bastard, like her half-sister Mary before her – no longer the heir to the throne, nor a princess, but simply the ‘Lady Elizabeth’.3 Shortly afterwards, the line of succession was at last established elsewhere, with the arrival of the longed-for male heir, Edward, born in 1537 to Jane Seymour, the new wife Henry married less than a fortnight after Anne’s death.

  However, there was nothing straightforward about Elizabeth’s revised position as the king’s illegitimate daughter. Despite the fact that, formally, Henry professed to believe that Anne had committed adultery with five men, one of them her own brother, he never showed any sign of doubt that Elizabeth was his child – and physically there was a strong resemblance, since the little girl had inherited his striking auburn hair and fair skin along with her mother’s dark eyes. Nor, clearly, was she a mere by-blow, the product of some fleeting court dalliance. She and her half-sister Mary had each been born to an anointed and crowned Queen of England – Anne had been six months pregnant with Elizabeth when she sat in state at her coronation in Westminster Abbey – even if their mothers had later, in turn, been stripped of that title. And as the years went on, Henry enshrined the ambiguities of his daughters’ histories in statute law. The Act of Succession of 1544 named Mary and Elizabeth as royal heirs to their half-brother Edward, while at the same time Henry continued to insist, in all other contexts, on their bastardy.

  It was a contradiction that troubled their father little. Within his looking-glass world, the king found no difficulty in believing the impossible, if it helped satisfy his need to characterize his own wishes and desires as legally, morally and theologically correct. But it left Elizabeth’s future in political limbo. The lives of most royal women were shaped by marriage to husbands whose identities were decided by the manoeuvrings of national and international diplomacy. Elizabeth and her half-sister were pawns in this matrimonial game – but pawns whose value was extraordinarily difficult to assess. They we
re daughters of a king, but a king who had declared them both illegitimate. As a result, they could not stand in the front rank of eligible royal brides, even without the further complication of the profound religious schism that now divided their father from his Catholic counterparts on the continent.

  At the same time, these were pawns who – however unlikely it seemed – might one day become queens. Until their half-brother Edward had children of his own, their place in the line of succession made their marriages a matter of intense political significance. There had never yet been a reigning queen of England, and the prospect was an alarming one: ‘man is the head of woman’, St Paul had declared,4 which meant that female rule was both disturbingly unnatural in theory and difficult to envisage in practical reality. So of course, since man was the head of woman, a reigning queen’s husband would exercise a guiding hand on his royal wife and, through her, the kingdom. If this proximity to the throne made Henry’s bastard daughters more appealing as potential brides, it also meant that the king and his advisers had every reason to scrutinize potential suitors with the greatest possible caution.

  Politically, therefore, Mary and Elizabeth could not anticipate the lives that lay ahead of them with any degree of confidence. But, for Elizabeth, that structural contingency was paired with a much more profound insecurity. Mary’s first decade had been spent as the fêted child of devoted royal parents. The long-drawn-out disintegration of Henry and Catherine’s marriage and her father’s cruel treatment of her mother and herself caused deep trauma, of a kind which fed Mary’s emotional intensity and her dogmatic faith. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was too young when her mother died to have any memory of her, or of a time when her own position in the world had been anything other than precarious. Instead, she grew up knowing that her mother had been killed on the orders of her father. And yet her father was the one certainty that remained, without whose approval she could not hope to flourish. As the twelve-year-old Elizabeth said in the only surviving letter she ever wrote to him – a formal Latin composition to accompany a New Year’s gift – ‘I am bound unto you as lord by the law of royal authority, as lord and father by the law of nature, and as greatest lord and matchless and most benevolent father by the divine law, and by all laws and duties I am bound unto your majesty in various and manifold ways …’5

  Before her eighth birthday, Elizabeth had gained and lost three stepmothers. The first, Jane Seymour, died of an infection less than a fortnight after giving birth to Henry’s son. The second, Anne of Cleves, was rejected by the king, who found himself disappointed by the personal reality of this diplomatic match before the marriage had even taken effect. And the third, Katherine Howard – a cousin of Elizabeth’s mother, not yet out of her teens – was killed in the same way as Anne, as a result of similar charges of sexual misconduct. From the summer of 1543 a fourth stepmother, the kind and clever Katherine Parr, began to facilitate a more workable approximation of functional family life for the three royal siblings. But the violent riptides of politics at their father’s court were never far away, and Elizabeth had neither the unique status of her brother Edward as heir to the throne nor, like half-Spanish Mary, powerful relatives on the continent to keep a weather eye on her welfare.

  At a distance of almost half a millennium, the effects of these formative experiences on Elizabeth are not easy to explore. In the absence of the types of evidence which, in a later period, might offer direct insight into deeply private thoughts and feelings, the temptation is simply to dismiss them as unknowable. Not only that, but the bludgeoning familiarity of the narrative of Henry and his six wives tends, now, to numb our imaginative response to the terrors of an age when the toxic combination of a king’s monstrous ego and profound religious division made politics a blood sport, on a scale previously unknown in England outside the havoc of civil war. And, if there is a historiographical case for merely noting the facts of Elizabeth’s childhood and moving on, it often seems to be reinforced by the enigma she presents in the historical record. Her intellect is clear in every surviving word she ever wrote or spoke. Infinitely less clear is the emotional burden or subtext of what she said, hidden as it always was behind the carapace of a carefully constructed public self.

  But this unreadability is not a trick of the historical light: Elizabeth was as unfathomable to her contemporaries as she is to posterity. (As the King of Spain’s ambassador in London wrote in 1566 – significantly, perhaps, concerning the personally as well as politically fraught question of whether Elizabeth would choose to marry – ‘she is so nimble in her dealing and threads in and out of this business in such a way that her most intimate favourites fail to understand her, and her intentions are therefore variously interpreted.’)6 Her inscrutability, in other words, is evidence in itself. What we know, for example, about her response to the loss of her mother is this. She never once, at least so far as the extant sources can tell us, uttered Anne’s name. She lionized the father who was responsible for her mother’s execution. Yet, when she secured the degree of control over her environment to make it possible, she chose to surround herself with her mother’s blood relatives. And in her later years she owned an exquisite mother-of-pearl locket ring, studded with rubies and diamonds, which opened to reveal miniature paired portraits of herself and Anne. Arguments from silence are notoriously difficult to make, and the specific sentiments behind these silent actions are impossible to elucidate; but, whatever else they may or may not suggest, this handful of observations can hardly stand as evidence that the knowledge of her mother’s violent death left Elizabeth’s psyche unaffected and undisturbed.

  From the moment of her earliest conscious memories, then, a deep and enduring insecurity – insecurity that was a matter of both external political reality and, so far as it is possible to tell, her internal psychological landscape – was the defining feature of Elizabeth’s life. It forged her sharp intellect into a cautious and subtle intelligence, and her interaction with the world into a masked and watchful reactivity, even before the dramatic and perilous sequence of events that brought Anne Boleyn’s bastard daughter to inherit Henry VIII’s throne. But sovereignty did not bring safety, and those same instincts – to watch and wait, to choose her friends carefully and her enemies more carefully still – continued to guide the new queen as the threats to her person and her kingdom mutated and multiplied. The experience of insecurity, it turned out, would shape one of the most remarkable monarchs in England’s history.

  1

  Much Suspected

  1547–1558

  Elizabeth’s world changed for ever on Friday 28 January 1547, when her father died in the early hours of the morning. For thirteen years, his cruel and self-serving capriciousness – a dependable uncertainty, a known unknown – had dictated the course of her life. Now, her half-brother Edward wore the crown, and she faced the unknown unknowns that would come with the rule of the noblemen who barged and jostled for power around him. Chief among them was the boy-king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (and soon Duke of Somerset), who was appointed Lord Protector of the realm and Governor of the king’s person during the royal minority. Seymour had carried Elizabeth in his arms at Edward’s christening nine years earlier; it remained to be seen whether his support would always be as steadfast.

  From day to day, Elizabeth’s routine continued, at least in the schoolroom. She had been studying Latin, Italian and French for some years already, and a few months before her father’s death she had begun to learn Greek under the guidance of William Grindal, a brilliant young Cambridge-trained scholar. When in January 1548 Grindal died suddenly of the plague, he was replaced by his close friend and former tutor, Roger Ascham, who guided Elizabeth through an intensive programme of learning by double translation: rendering classical and religious texts into English, then re-translating that new English version back into the original language. Mornings were for Greek, afternoons for Latin – a daily regime which also offered the opportunity to practise the beautiful italic hand
writing she had been taught by her French tutor, Jean Belmain. Her command of language had been precocious from the start: a courtier who encountered the six-year-old Elizabeth in 1539 reported that she spoke ‘with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old’.1 But now she was being trained as a sophisticated linguistic technician: how to use words, on the page and in person, to flatter, to persuade, to argue, to conceal.

  Domestic warmth and constancy were provided by her governess Katherine Champernowne, who had recently married one of Elizabeth’s many Boleyn cousins, a Norfolk gentleman named John Ashley. Kate Ashley, as she now was, had no children of her own and – at about thirty to Elizabeth’s thirteen – was old enough to offer a quasi-maternal presence of care and support. Theirs was a complex intimacy, a deepening friendship between an adolescent almost-princess and a woman who was both her governess and her servant. Kate and her family believed in the new humanist-inspired fashion for educating girls, and she did everything she could to encourage Elizabeth’s learning. Then, when Elizabeth’s living arrangements changed in the aftermath of Henry’s death, it transpired that Kate was also prepared to encourage something much more dangerous.

  In the early months of the new reign, Elizabeth – with Kate Ashley at her side – was sent to live with her widowed stepmother, Katherine Parr. It was a seemly and seemingly happy arrangement, which promised to enfold an orphaned royal daughter within a nurturing home until she grew old enough to have an establishment of her own. Within weeks, however, the nature of the household was radically altered. Before she had caught the old king’s eye, Katherine Parr – who was already by then twice widowed – had hoped to marry Thomas Seymour, younger brother of Henry’s third wife, Jane, and of the new Lord Protector. Thomas was handsome, dashing and relentlessly ambitious. It now became clear that Katherine’s affection for him was undimmed. His attraction to her was redoubled by her new status as Queen Dowager. They married secretly in the spring of 1547, a rash and scandalously precipitate act which, when it became known, angered and alarmed Seymour’s brother and the rest of the Privy Council. Still, it could not be undone; and Elizabeth, at not quite fourteen, found herself living with a new stepfather.