She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (63 page)

And it stood at the heart of Knox’s portrayal of ‘that cruel monster Mary’, when – with gloriously unacknowledged irony, amid his argument that her rule was monstrous precisely because she was female – he declared that she was ‘unworthy, by reason of her bloody tyranny, of the name of woman’.

How, then, was a woman to rule, to exercise power that was made for male hands, without being sucked into the quicksand?
The traditional answer has been that Elizabeth learned from her sister’s devastating mistakes to develop a new and uniquely imposing form of queenship. Certainly, she had a cool and capricious intelligence, a silver-tongued capacity to say everything and nothing at the same time, that was very different from the deeply felt, dogmatic certainties by which her sister lived and ruled. Certainly too, the very English brand of pragmatic Protestantism at which Elizabeth eventually arrived – famously making no windows into men’s souls – sought to unite as many of her people as possible around her sovereignty, rather than enforcing divisive spiritual truths with still more divisive violence.

But hindsight – the writing of history in lastingly Protestant England, and the comparison between one queen who ruled for five years and another who ruled for forty-five, not to mention the dazzling effect of Elizabeth’s own propaganda – has tended to obscure the extent to which Elizabeth and Mary used the same strategies in representing the force of their female sovereignty. ‘She was a queen, and by the same title a king also,’ the bishop of Winchester said of Mary. ‘She was a sister to her that by the like title and right is both king and queen at this present of this realm.’ And both women did speak of themselves as English kings. ‘Parliament was not accustomed to use such language to the kings of England’, Mary admonished her Speaker. Princess Elizabeth, in desperate appeal after Wyatt’s rebellion to her sister’s royal promise that she should not be condemned without trial, reminded Mary that ‘the king’s word is more than another man’s oath’. Most famously of all, Elizabeth as queen declared that, though she had ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman’ (a gesture towards the frailties of her sex that she, like Mary, regularly made, although with rather less conviction), she had ‘the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’.

But these female kings, unlike their male counterparts, were also wife and mother to their kingdom. Elizabeth’s reported speech to her parliament in February 1559 echoed Mary’s rallying-cry to the Londoners at the Guildhall. ‘I am already bound unto a husband,
which is the kingdom of England,’ Elizabeth told her subjects, and, like her sister before her, showed the ‘spousal ring’ that she had received at her coronation. ‘And reproach me no more that I have no children; for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children …’ Four years later, she declared to the Commons that ‘though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all’.

The difference between the two queens – and a huge difference it was – lay in the fact that Elizabeth’s coronation ring was not jostling for room on her fingers with a plain gold wedding band such as the one Mary wore. Elizabeth had time and space to consider the marriage that her subjects assumed she would make, in a way that Mary never had. At twenty-five, she had years of potential childbearing ahead of her, and in the meantime she – unlike Mary – had no obvious heir of an unhelpfully different faith hovering unsupportively on the outskirts of her court. The lack of an obvious heir was a cause of anxious unease to her councillors, and her marriage the subject of repeated petitions from her parliaments; Elizabeth was staking a great deal on her own survival, as her subjects fretfully reminded her after she had suffered a dangerous attack of smallpox in 1562. But while she lived, the uncertainty of the succession reinforced her own status as the source of all security for her realm, and she seized this chance to rule as a virgin queen, putting off until a perpetual tomorrow the urgent dilemmas that had been Mary’s from the moment of her accession.

And it was as the Virgin Queen that Elizabeth constructed her own answer to those dilemmas. She had witnessed the desperate disadvantages of her sister’s Spanish marriage at close hand. Now she observed from a distance the horrifying consequences of the successive marriages of her cousin Mary, queen of Scots, to her lords Darnley and Bothwell, which set in train the events that led to Mary’s deposition, exile, and incarceration in an English prison. Suitors for Elizabeth’s hand came and went, and she dallied, diplomatically or otherwise, but would commit to none. Meanwhile, her
subjects could enthusiastically agree that the queen should choose a husband, but any candidate in particular always provoked as much dissent as applause. By the late 1570s time had run out. Where Mary’s marriage to her kingdom had been compromised by the troubling implications of the fact that she was also wife to a king, for Elizabeth, it was now clear, the union between monarch and realm would transcend metaphor to be both enduring and exclusive.

The courtly compliments continued, but now to Gloriana, a sovereign queen at the centre of a secularised cult replacing the Mariolatry that was forbidden in Protestant England. Elizabeth had begun her reign by clutching the cloak of Deborah around her; now her authority was armoured with a voraciously eclectic array of images, myths, allegories and symbols. She was king, queen, virgin, wife, mother and goddess; Diana, Astraea, Phoebe, Juno, Cynthia; the phoenix, eternally rising from the flames, and the pelican, a mystical mother to her people; not only Deborah but also the biblical Judith, whose daring and courage saved Israel from the Assyrians. Elizabeth had used her providential destiny to turn Knox on his head: the fact that a mere woman could rule in such glory demonstrated how special an instrument of God’s will this queen really was.

But the power of Elizabeth’s image was not an empty shell. The foundation of her authority – like that for which Matilda had fought so hard four centuries before, and succeeded at last in establishing for her son and the generations that followed – was her lineal right, inherited from her imposing father. If she was king as well as queen, a woman with a male heart and male courage, there was one man in particular from whom her power derived: ‘we hope to rule, govern and keep this our realm’, she told her parliament in 1559, ‘in as good justice, peace and rest, in like wise as the king my father held you in’.

‘Good justice’ mattered too. As Isabella had found two hundred years earlier, legitimacy of action – the reponsibilities as well as the rights of kingship – could consolidate power in unlikely female hands. A French queen consort with her lover by her side,
she succeeded in bringing down her husband’s tyranny – only to discover, in imposing a tyranny of her own, that the sword she had wielded could turn on her too. Elizabeth, mindful of Knox’s charge that her rule was a tyranny by simple virtue (or defect) of her sex, took constant care that her government, however contentious or intractable the matters with which it had to grapple, should plausibly be perceived to represent the ‘common weal’ – and that she herself should be seen as the champion of her people, with, as she declared in 1588, ‘my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects’.

That legitimacy could only be maintained, as Margaret of Anjou had so agonisingly discovered, if government were animated by the royal will of the sovereign. However skilled Elizabeth was at procrastination, however little she liked to narrow down the options in front of her, there could be no mistaking that the queen’s authority was the animating force by which decisions were made or (often) deferred. ‘Little man, little man,’ the almost seventy-year-old queen reproved a councillor who dared to suggest that she must go to bed during what would prove to be her final illness, ‘the word “must” is not to be used to princes!’ And she drew on what Charles V had called the ‘assistance and consent of the foremost men of the land’ with consummate skill, choosing her councillors well, delegating wisely, and blaming them roundly for decisions – such as the execution of her cousin Mary, queen of Scots – from which she wished to place herself at an exculpatory distance.

Perhaps more than anything, Elizabeth – like her remarkable ancestor Eleanor of Aquitaine – governed with acumen gained through adversity, albeit that Elizabeth’s adversity came much earlier, and more profoundly formatively, than the reverses in Eleanor’s extraordinary life. Elizabeth learned watchfulness in the nursery, and only later learned to inhabit the sovereignty to which she might never have come, whereas the lengthy loss of Eleanor’s freedom came as a traumatic jolt to a woman who had been a queen since she was thirteen and a great heiress before that. But in both women a quicksilver intelligence and a steely will were
skilfully channelled into a public authority of remarkable force.

The glittering carapace of Elizabeth’s image owed something, too, to Eleanor. The troubadours of twelfth-century Aquitaine followed Eleanor’s route north to Paris, Normandy and England, bringing with them songs of
fin’amor
, a new form of lyric poetry in which knights pledged themselves to the service of the lady they loved, a figure of remote and wilful allure who was simultaneously idealised and eroticised in their breathless verse. In fact, there is no evidence that Eleanor participated directly in this cult of courtly love, beyond the fact that the poets wrote in lands over which she presided as queen and duchess, but four centuries later Elizabeth was well aware of its political potential. Where her sister Mary had constructed her authority as a female ruler on the foundation of her irreproachable virtue, piety and sense of duty, Elizabeth was a very different kind of virgin queen. Virtuous, pious and dutiful, certainly, as occasion demanded; but also worshipped by the devoted knights of her court, who were bound to her by their elaborately declared love, along with their loyalty. (‘While your majesty gives me leave to say I love you,’ the twenty-five-year-old earl of Essex told the fifty-seven-year-old queen in 1591, ‘my fortune is, as my affection, unmatchable. If ever you deny me that liberty, you may end my life, but never shake my constancy, for were the sweetness of your nature turned into the greatest bitterness that could be, it is not in your power, as great a queen as you are, to make me love you less.’)

This Virgin Queen could do much. She was seductive Venus as well as chaste Diana. She was both a king and a queen, a man’s heart in a woman’s breast. What Knox had denounced as her ‘monstrous regiment’ had given England the golden age of Gloriana. But the one thing she could not do was the one thing every king saw as the
sine qua non
of his kingship: to ensure the continuity of his bloodline and the security of his realm by handing on the crown to an heir of his own body. Elizabeth’s formidable control of her country’s present had been bought at the cost of abdicating her stake in its future.

We are left to wonder: would Matilda – who was, unlike Elizabeth, the mother as well as the daughter of a great King Henry – have exchanged her son’s inheritance for the crown she never wore?

Note on Sources and Further Reading

 

 

 

This is the first time I have begun a bibliographic note with a reference to sources online: in the years it has taken to write this book the extent and quality of historical materials on the net has transformed the experience of research. The
Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography
(http://www.oxforddnb.com) is a treasure trove of scholarship and insight, available through personal subscription and to members of academic and public libraries; almost every individual mentioned in these pages who was either born in the British Isles or contributed significantly to their history has an entry of their own, complete with extensive bibliographical references. And
British History Online
(http://www.british-history.ac.uk) is a remarkable digital library created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, which makes available an impressive range of printed primary and secondary sources for the history of the British Isles, most free to view, some by personal subscription.

Both sites are an excellent starting-point for ‘Beginnings’, the first section of this book. The personalities and politics of the Tudor court can be tracked through the pages of the
ODNB
, while
British History Online
offers access to many important primary sources for the reign of Edward VI – especially, here, the reports of the imperial ambassador Jehan Scheyfve for 1553, which are available in translation in the
Calendar of State Papers, Spain
, vol. 11, ed. R. Tyler (1916).

The historiography of the Tudor period is vast and ever expanding. As a starting-point, see John Guy’s classic
Tudor England
(1988), Susan Brigden’s
New Worlds, Lost Worlds
(2001), and
Henry
VIII: Man and Monarch
, ed. Susan Doran (2009). For the life of Edward VI, see Jennifer Loach’s posthumously published
Edward
VI
, ed. G. Bernard and P. Williams (1999); Hester Chapman’s
The
Last Tudor King: A Study of Edward VI
(1961); W. K. Jordan’s two volumes
Edward VI: The Young King
(1968) and
Edward VI: The
Threshold of Power
(1970); and Chris Skidmore’s biography
Edward
VI: The Lost King of England
(2007). For the politics of the reign, see Stephen Alford,
Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward
VI
(2002), and, on religion, Diarmaid MacCulloch,
Tudor Church
Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation
(1999), and Eamon Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in
England, 1400–1580
(1992). For Edward’s own political journal, see
Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth
, ed. J. G. Nichols (1857), and
The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI
, ed. W. K. Jordan (1966). For masques at Edward’s court, see Sydney Anglo,
Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy
(1969), and for his illness, G. Holmes, F. Holmes, and J. McMorrough, ‘The death of young King Edward VI’,
New England Journal of Medicine
, 345 (2001), 60–2. For discussion of Henry VIII’s will and Edward VI’s ‘device’ for the succession, see Eric Ives, ‘Tudor Dynastic Problems Revisited’,
Historical Research
, 81 (2008), 255–79, and his
Lady
Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
(2009); I hope it will be clear how much I owe to Professor Ives’s work, even while my conclusions differ from his.