The Men Who Would Be King (10 page)

When these with violence were burned to death,

We wished for our Elizabeth,

proclaimed a fervent contemporary ballad. All comparison with Mary seemed to make Elizabeth shine the brighter. The smudge of possible illegitimacy faded beside the glorious truth that she was “of no mingled blood of Spaniard or stranger, but born mere English here among us, and therefore most natural unto us,” and the Protestant religion that she represented had acquired a new aura of desirable nationalism through the experience of Mary's brand of Catholicism. As Philip's ambassador wrote to him with ruthless frankness, “They say it is through Your Majesty that the country is in such want, and Calais lost, and also that through your not coming to see the Queen she died of grief.”

Mary died just before dawn on November 17, 1558, and her half sister stepped from the shadows to become Queen of England, once again the most desirable bride in Europe. Elizabeth was now twenty-five; her youth had given way to womanhood. But her time of dalliance was about to begin.

4

“A Great Resort of Wooers”

F
rom the moment of Elizabeth's succession to the throne of England, the hunt was up in earnest. On the afternoon of Mary's death the church bells were pealing for Elizabeth, and by the evening Londoners were flocking into the streets to eat and drink and make merry in their traditional fashion, while blazing bonfires glowered like beacons near the trestle tables, keeping the chill November night at bay. Some echoes of their cheer, glimmers from those fires, may have drifted through the city to Durham Place, where the new Spanish ambassador, the haughty, aristocratic Count de Feria, was in no mood for rejoicing. If England was not to slip from the empire's grasp, after all Philip's sacrifices and compromises, infinite diplomatic pains and skill would be required, and there was no time to lose. “It is very early yet to talk about marriage,” Feria wrote distractedly, “but the confusion and instability of these people in all their affairs make it necessary for us to be the more alert.” No one, however, was quite as acutely alert as the royal prey they sought. Elizabeth had inherited a kingdom beset by difficulties, strained by religious controversy and the threat of foreign aggression, and the caution, the sense of wariness, and the ability to dissemble that she had developed to a fine art during the past ten years were still her most effective defense. “The more I think over this business, the more certain I am that everything depends upon the husband that this woman may take,” Feria commented to Philip. For the time being, Elizabeth's throne depended upon her ability to stave off that choice, and avoid commitment to one so that she might keep all expectant.

The one great commitment that the new queen embraced wholeheartedly was to her own people. When Feria tried to claim that she owed her crown to Philip, she at once contradicted him; she owed it to her people, she said. All through her youth Elizabeth had known that popularity with the fickle, impetuous crowds was a crop worth cultivating. As a frightened fifteen-year-old she had striven to avoid gaining “the ill-will of the people”; on her way to imprisonment in Mary's reign she had opened her litter and shown herself to them in her hour of disgrace, white faced and proud; two years afterwards, when she left court abruptly after refusing to marry Emmanuel Philibert, the crowds who saw her pass were so fervent in their greetings that she had to send some of her retinue to restrain them, lest she should be accused of inciting them to rebellion. But now that she was queen she was free to play up to her subjects with a shameless enjoyment of the whole performance. As she made her grand procession from the state apartments in the Tower through the streets of London on January 14, 1559, the day before her coronation, she “was received by the people with prayers, welcomings, cries, and tender words, and all signs which argue an earnest love of subjects towards their sovereign; and the Queen, by holding up her hands and glad countenance to such as stood afar off, and most tender language to those that stood nigh to Her Grace, showed herself no less thankful to receive the people's goodwill than they to offer it.” The enthusiastic crowds who jostled excitedly to gain a glimpse of Elizabeth as she passed were “wonderfully transported with the loving answers and gestures of the Queen.” Richly regal though she was, she had inherited her father's talent for the common touch—calling out a witty reply to one; graciously accepting some humble gift, such as the branch of rosemary that a poor woman gave her in Fleet Street, from another—and though intuitive, the effect was brilliantly contrived to win her subjects' delighted devotion. Her reply to the Recorder of London, who presented her with an ornamented purse crammed with gold, rang out into the crisp snowy air with the shining promise, “And persuade yourselves, that for the safety and quietness of you all, I will not spare if need be to spend my blood.” Feria did not exaggerate when he wrote disapprovingly to Philip: “She is very much wedded to the people, and thinks as they do.”

It was his unenviable task to persuade her to think as Philip did. At first, despite his deep pessimism at the way English affairs were tending, he felt that “with great negotiation and money” this giddy, willful young woman might conceivably be cajoled or forced into favoring the empire, and taking whatever husband Philip might think best for her. “If she decides to marry out of the country, she will at once fix her eyes on Your Majesty,” he told Philip confidently. By the curious destiny that so often decreed that Elizabeth's weaknesses should serve her as well as her strengths, in the vulnerable first weeks of her reign Philip was obliged by circumstances to act as Elizabeth's protector, to ensure that her hold upon her shifting, expectant nation should not be weakened, for if she were to be dislodged from her throne he would be faced with the disastrous prospect of an absolute French takeover of England. When the news of Mary's death had reached France, Henry II had promptly made his intentions aggressively plain, by proclaiming his heir's young wife Mary, Queen of Scots, Queen of England and Ireland. The pretty Scottish dauphine had a strong claim, as senior great-granddaughter of Henry VII; if Elizabeth were dispossessed, France would almost inevitably make good that claim by absorbing England and Ireland into the great territories that already included Scotland; and Philip was prepared to go to considerable lengths to prevent so valuable a prize from passing to his rival—a fact of which Elizabeth was quite well aware.

With Mary's death, and her own succession, a new characteristic became evident in Elizabeth. Alongside the familiar caution and dissembling that had brought her through the crises of her austere youth, there appeared a new element of zest, a half-suppressed merriment, as though the laughter and teasing that had been abruptly hushed in her early adolescence were now belatedly breaking out. Circumspect and adroit though she was in her marriage dealings, conscious as she was from the first that the question of whom she would marry was crucial to England's future, there were nevertheless times when she plainly reveled in the role she was so skillfully playing, and more than one ambassador, come with due reverence to treat of royal matrimony, began to feel, disconcertingly, that laughter was lurking somewhere behind the Queen of England's elegant pale countenance.

Feria became increasingly exasperated with her behavior. When gratified by presents of jewels, or alerted by news of a truce between France and Spain, Elizabeth was charming to the point of coquetry in her behavior to him, but he found it bafflingly difficult to make any real progress with her. “The most discreet people fear she will marry for caprice,” he complained. When he broached the subject of religion, anxious to discover straightaway what her religion was to be, she answered him gravely that she would certainly not forget God, who had been so good to her—“Which,” Feria remarked with some perplexity, “appeared to me rather an equivocal reply.” She made a point of informing him, in the sweetest tones, that her sympathies were not with France, and yet he was only too conscious that the current of feeling at court was flowing strongly against himself and Spain. “They are very glad to be free of Your Majesty, as though you had done them harm instead of good,” he told Philip frankly, and went on, “I am so isolated from them that I am much embarrassed and puzzled to get the means of discovering what is going on, for truly they run away from me as if I were the devil.” In Mary's time he had had a suite of rooms inside the palace of Whitehall, but now he found himself deprived of this valuable access to the center of affairs, and when he pressed for the apartments to be restored to him Elizabeth bashfully sent him the explanation that it would not be proper for him to sleep under the same roof as herself, as she was unmarried. “In return for all my efforts to please I believe they would like to see me thrown into the river,” he wrote bitterly. The English were uncivilized, their ruler was a mere “young lass, who, though sharp, is without prudence,” the kingdom was “entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors,” and by the end of January 1559, when Elizabeth had been on her insecure throne for less than three months, the Spaniard vented his frustrations in the goaded comment, “In Scotland I believe they are ill-treating the English. I am sure they are not doing it so much as I could wish.”

While Feria was trying by every means in his power to convince Elizabeth and her Privy Council that it was essential for her to marry a foreigner, the English, equally anxious that her husband should be an Englishman, were tossing the names of possible suitors into the air like scraps of paper, “so that nearly every day there is a new cry raised about a husband.” Now that Courtenay was dead it was not easy to judge whom the most eligible suitor to the new queen might be. The Tudor tendency to produce daughters, coupled with the depletion of the ancient nobility, had helped to bring about a noticeable lack of young peers of old lineage and “high blood or degree.” The only remaining duke was twenty-two-year-old Norfolk, who had now succeeded his grandfather, and when Elizabeth came to the throne he was just about to marry for the second time. Since there was no candidate who obviously represented the ideal combination of situation, rank, and age, the rumors fluttered freely about, while Elizabeth herself gave no definite indication of whom, if anyone, she favored. The truth was that nothing could have served her interests better than the uncertainty and the fluctuating reports. After her joyless youth she was finding the attention novel and flattering, and it suited her policy admirably that Spanish apprehensions that she might “marry for caprice” and succumb to one of her own subjects should be heightened. The more suitors who joined the chase, the longer she might justifiably shy away from giving a firm answer to anyone, and to Philip in particular.

One of the few Englishmen who might have been a fitting husband for the queen by virtue of his ancient and honorable descent and whom rumor accordingly whirled aloft was the elderly widower Lord Arundel. He was the twelfth earl, his title far older than that of his young son-in-law the Duke of Norfolk; he had been Henry VIII's Lord Chamberlain and Mary's Lord Steward of the Household; but he was not a man of much perception, and as so often happens when a middle-aged man pays court to a young woman, he was made to appear rather silly over his apparent hopes of winning Elizabeth. Feria—understandably, in view of Arundel's eligibility—was particularly scathing about him.

In Mary's reign there had been some talk of a marriage between Elizabeth and Arundel's heir, Lord Maltravers, but the young man had died in 1556, and perhaps Arundel had cherished secret hopes of wooing Elizabeth for himself ever since the spring day when she was a friendless prisoner in the Tower and he, sent in stern guise to assist at her questioning, had surprised everyone, and probably himself as well, by falling on his knees and exclaiming that she was innocent. At the time of Mary's death he was in Flanders, taking part in the truce negotiations, but by December 7 he had returned to England, having traveled on the same ship as the suave Spaniard Bishop de Quadra, who had come to assist Feria in the pursuit of Elizabeth. “I believe the tears of the Earl of Arundel floated them into port,” Feria wrote to Philip, “for they say the Earl cried like a child.” Whether seasickness or emotion, or both, caused the earl to weep, his tears were soon dried, and he was to be seen at the palace in fine fettle, “very smart and clean, and they say he carried his thoughts very high.” Though Feria dismissed him as “a flighty man, of small ability,” Arundel continued to play a prominent part in public affairs, and for her coronation Elizabeth appointed him Lord High Steward, a mark of honor which did nothing to dampen the talk of his hopes; at the lavish ceremonials he strutted about “with a silver staff a yard in length,” commanding everybody in great style. “The Earl of Arundel has been going about in high glee for some time, and is very smart,” Feria observed at the end of December 1558; late in the following autumn Arundel's personal interest in the queen was still smoldering with enough warmth to ignite a violent quarrel between himself and another potential English suitor, Sir William Pickering, an old friend of Elizabeth's whom she treated with great favor.