The Men Who Would Be King (21 page)

With many sighs she told the French ambassador Paul de Foix that she only wished she were ten years younger. He, primed with bland reassurances, declared that she would have many children, that Charles would come to her in the flower of his youth, and that any disadvantages must be on his side, for she had nothing to lose and would remain all powerful. Difficulties could easily be dealt with in advance by drawing up contracts. At this Elizabeth went a little too far. With an innocent air she asked who would bring the king to justice if he should break them. De Foix became very dignified; taking this to be a refusal, he replied that he could see her affections were engaged elsewhere. Elizabeth certainly did not intend to refuse the Valois king at this stage, however, and so she exerted all her charm to mollify the ambassador; she told him this was not a refusal, she merely wished that the difficulties she foresaw should be pointed out to Queen Catherine, and before the interview ended she had a stool brought for him, and thanked him winningly for the flattering reports of her that he had sent to his king and the queen-regent. There were times when Elizabeth's motives were transparently clear.

When she heard that the ominous meeting between the Queens of France and Spain was about to take place at Bayonne, her behavior to de Foix could not have been more sweetly encouraging. The reunion of Catherine de' Medici and her darling daughter Elisabeth, Philip of Spain's wife, threatened to result in the Catholic league that loyal Englishmen most feared; at such a moment it behoved Elizabeth of England to show great interest in the possibility of marrying the King of France. Almost girlishly she told de Foix that she wished she had had the good fortune to be present at Bayonne as a third queen, then passing to the subject of the marriage she observed that there was really only one difficulty, that of age. But she went on to say that in her ambassador's last report he had written that Charles was so wonderfully grown that after a mere absence of three weeks he had been scarcely recognizable, and it seemed he would become as tall as his father had been. At dinner de Foix was seated at the queen's side; she seemed full of happiness, and drank to the king's health. After dinner she kept the Frenchman by her, and chattered to him about France, its glories and its court—“like someone,” de Foix recorded, “who is relishing things they expect to possess one day.” Catherine de' Medici was shrewd and guileful, but she was not so accomplished an actress as the Queen of England.

At Bordeaux, in April, the English ambassador Sir Thomas Smith had an audience with Catherine, in which she told him plainly that there were only three serious objections to the match. The first was the age of her son, but she assured him that if Elizabeth would put up with that, she herself would put up with Elizabeth's age. At this point the young king Charles broke in, exclaiming eagerly, “I find no fault. I would she could be as well content with me as I am with her age.” The other difficulties that Catherine spoke of were the question of Elizabeth having to reside in France at times, and the discontent of the English people and nobility that might result, but she pointed out that England and France united would be so strong that they would have nothing to fear from anyone. Smith answered discreetly that his limited instructions did not permit him to give a reply to that, but he had a few dry words for the youthful suitor. “If the King had three or four years more, and had seen the Queen's Majesty, and were fallen in love with her,” he observed, “then I would not marvel at this haste.” “Why, I do love her indeed,” protested Charles, to which Smith answered blightingly that he did not yet know what love was, but he would soon go through it; “It is the most foolish thing,” said Smith, “the most impatient, most hasty and disrespectful that can be.” Understandably, the young king blushed, and Catherine intervened on his behalf, saying, “This is no foolish love.” Smith courteously assented, but he added some weighty comments about the serious nature of such a marriage, with a degree of conviction that was generally lacking from the tone of the negotiations.

As the Bayonne meeting drew nearer, Catherine pressed for an answer, while Elizabeth played for time, offering evasive protestations of friendship and then expressing doubts about Catherine's sincerity. All such doubts were amply justified, since, ironically, both she and Catherine had entered into marriage negotiations with the House of Austria. A match between one of the emperor's daughters and Charles IX was being discussed, while Elizabeth was complaisantly receiving the renewed advances of the emperor's brother the archduke Charles. The matrimonial game was a complex one, but Elizabeth was an experienced player. The Habsburg archduke was the suitor with whom she desired to dally at length; the immature King of France was a welcome, but dispensible, makeweight.

“She is so nimble in her dealing, and threads in and out of the business in such a way that her most intimate favourites fail to understand her,” the Spanish ambassador wrote vexedly in the following year. Though the archduke's suit seemed to be prospering, Charles IX was still talked of, while Elizabeth herself veered between appearing resolved to marry some great prince for the sake of her country and declaring herself resolved never to marry at all. The most intimate favorite of all, Leicester, by no means confident that his own suit would ever succeed, was smiling and scheming between the lodgings of the rival ambassadors. He made a convincing show of supporting the Austrian match at first, but his serious dealings were with the French. While Cecil, Norfolk, and the weight of reason were giving strong support to the Habsburg suit, Leicester was endeavoring to thwart it by encouraging the French; it was in his interests as well as theirs to hinder Elizabeth from concluding a marriage with the archduke. In the spring of 1566 Cecil's learned, intelligent wife told de Silva that in her opinion, “the Queen will never marry Lord Robert, or, indeed, anyone else, unless it be the Archduke, which is the match Cecil desires.” It was with the intention of altering that situation that Leicester had joined forces with Catherine de' Medici's ambassador, to lend some heat to Charles IX's tepid wooing while it lasted and thereby to acquire France's support for his own suit when they should need a new candidate with which to counter the archduke. As de Silva remarked to Cecil, “These Frenchmen are in a fine taking when they see the Archduke's own suit progressing, and at once bring their own King forward to embarrass the Queen. When they see that this trick has hindered the negotiation they take up with Leicester again, and think we do not see through them.” Amid the tensions and rivalries that accompanied Elizabeth's first French courtship a note of farce was discernible.

Elizabeth herself seemed well aware of the absurdity of a match with so young a suitor as Charles IX. In the summer of 1567, when she was nearly thirty-four and the boy king of France just seventeen, de Silva reported, “The Queen told me this afternoon on my introducing the matter as a joke that it was true the French had again addressed her, but it would not result in people seeing such a comical farce as an old woman leading a child to the church doors.” In similar tones she observed that people would say she was marrying her son, just as they had said King Philip was marrying his grandmother when he took her half sister, Mary Tudor, for his wife. Though she could speak lightly of that grim marriage it was obvious that it haunted her still, as a vivid warning of the ills that a wrong choice of consort might bring to herself and her realm. “She knew very well how the King of Spain had cursed the painters and envoys when he first beheld Queen Mary,” she told the Archduke's ambassador; to be emotionally rejected as Mary had been by her fine young husband was a prospect that Elizabeth, with her craving for constant male admiration and attention, could not endure. To marry a young consort, and above all a young French consort, would be to invite disillusionment. It was delightful to her to be courted by eligible men of almost any age, but to put their professed adoration to the test of a lifetime of marriage she neither dared nor desired to do.

“She seems to regard it as profitable to create delays somewhere or somehow in order to gain an advantage, and this we have long suspected on the logic of facts,” wrote the emperor that summer, in a private letter to his brother the archduke. He was finding Elizabeth more perplexing than ever to treat with over “this most difficult affair” of marriage. The Earl of Sussex had arrived in Vienna, to present the emperor with the insignia of the Order of the Garter that Elizabeth had encouragingly conferred upon him, and also to pursue the subject of the marriage; to the emperor's disquiet, Sussex “spontaneously laid stress upon the fact that should these negotiations lead to no result, the illustrious Queen, who is still being wooed by many others, is firmly resolved to marry the Most Christian King of France, in spite of the disparity of age.” Uncertain though he was of Elizabeth's real intentions, the emperor had no wish to see the great matrimonial prize fall to the young French king, and in his note to his brother he repeated his earnest hopes that the archduke would at last “contract this honourable and splendid marriage, which without doubt will redound to the great profit of the entire glorious House of Austria”—and, he might have added, to the great loss of the rival House of Valois. But the archduke's own skepticism extended further than the emperor's. “If the English Orator threatens that should the marriage negotiations with me make no progress his Queen would marry the King of France,” he wrote back, “I take this to be but an attempt to accelerate the negotiations.” Doubt and distrust were in the air, and Elizabeth's long dalliance with the Habsburg archduke was drawing to an end.

She found an effective shelter in the very real obstacle of the archduke's religion. He was too conscientious a Catholic to doff his faith for worldly gain, and Elizabeth, the head of the English church, would not recall the dark days of her sister's reign by inviting a Catholic Habsburg to share the throne of England. “I prize quietude of conscience and the continuance of the peaceable reign which I have begun and desire to pursue higher than all the favours which princes of the world and all kingdoms can confer upon me,” she wrote proudly to the emperor. It was one of the few clear sentences in a letter which the emperor irritably described as “most obscure, ambiguous, involved and of such a nature that we cannot learn from it whether the Queen is serious and sincere, or whether she wishes to befool us.” The archduke showed no great regret at the prospect of losing the glorious prize that had been held out to him for nearly eight years. “My opinion of the affair is that it will result in nothing,” he wrote judicially to his brother in January 1568, and could not resist adding, albeit respectfully, “and may it please Your Majesty to remember that this opinion always deterred me.” The courtship was dead, though not buried.

The noble, loyal Earl of Sussex came back to England from the imperial court full of grieved disappointment at the failure of the match, and convinced that Leicester's malevolent influence was responsible for it. “If it should ever please God to put into my dear mistress's heart to divide the weeds from the grain . . . she may, if she will, make a happy harvest,” he sighed, his devotion to the queen unimpaired by his bitter dislike for her favorite. It was partly out of dogged loyalty to her that he was led to hold Leicester accountable for her apparent errors of judgment; for those who, like Sussex, sincerely longed to see Elizabeth conclude an honorable marriage alliance, and could not understand her continuing failure to do so, ambitious, devious Leicester made a convenient whipping boy. The blame for the queen's neglect of what they regarded as the country's urgent need of a king-consort and an heir could convincingly be attributed to his influence. Certainly Leicester welcomed the disappearance of the archduke from the field, and there was no doubt that he had done all he could to thwart the match in the face of its formidable supporters, Cecil, Norfolk, and their adherents on the council. But in the last resort he was as powerless as they to force the queen's hand when it came to the final irrevocable step of marriage. His self-seeking maneuvers and their sincere advice could influence the course of a courtship, but no conscious persuasions in the world could have any real bearing on Elizabeth's decision not to marry, for that was the product of her own unreasoning instincts. Sussex did not perceive that her emotional dependence on Leicester was not a cause of that decision, but an effect.

Elizabeth's deep-rooted antipathy towards marriage, however advantageous, her fear of tying herself to one man, however attracted she might be to him, could only have been strengthened by the horrifying outcome of Mary, Queen of Scots's marriage to Lord Darnley. Never was Cecil's observation that “carnal marriages begin in gladness and end in strife” more vividly proved; the “long lad” with the delicate features and royal blood whom Mary had found so irresistible had degenerated into a vicious, physically repulsive nuisance to the Scottish queen, and in February 1567 had ended his short life as a strangled corpse in the garden of a blown-up house. There were parallels with the early days of Elizabeth's affair with Robert Dudley, when Amy Robsart had met her mysterious, violent death amid whirling rumors, but Mary did what Elizabeth had not done—promptly married the principal suspect, Lord Bothwell. The storm rose higher; the Scottish crowds roared “Burn the whore!” as Mary was hustled through the streets of Edinburgh under guard; battle, imprisonment, escape, flight followed, and then the ominous stillness of captivity in England, where she was to remain a prisoner for the rest of her life. “The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow,” Elizabeth called her in verse, but loyal Protestant Englishmen were blunter. She was “a killer of her husband and an adulteress,” as well as “a common disturber of the peace of this realm.” The list of queens whose marriages had ended in shame, grief, and death had grown longer; Elizabeth's mother; her stepmothers; her cousin Lady Jane Grey; her half sister, Mary; now her lovely cousin Mary Stuart. The woman who had cried as a child of eight, “I will never marry!” had been given little cause to change her mind as an adult.