The Spanish Armada (2 page)

After hastily dismounting, they knelt on the grass before the princess, who had been walking outside in the chill November air, and solemnly informed her of her half-sister’s death.

Elizabeth, the twenty-five-year-old red-headed daughter of Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII, had succeeded at last as Queen of England.

Although the fateful message from London had been expected almost hourly, its import still stunned her. She too fell to her knees and must have breathed a prayer of profound thanks both for her
survival and her safe accession. At length, after ‘a good time of respiration’, exaltation flooded through her body and she spoke her first
words as monarch,
choosing, in Latin, verse twenty-three from the Old Testament’s Psalm 118: ‘
Domino factum est istud, et est miribile in oculis nostris
’ – ‘This is the
Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes’.
³

Around seven o’clock that morning, Mary had died in St James’ Palace, London, only moments after the sacred Host had been solemnly elevated during a Mass celebrated in her
bedchamber. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she died in great pain from the ovarian cysts or uterine cancer that finally killed her. Death was energetically stalking abroad that day. An
epidemic of influenza (or more probably the ‘English Sweating Sickness’ a form of viral pneumonia),
⁴
which had carried off up to a fifth of
her subjects over the previous two years, still claimed its victims, including Cardinal Reginald Pole, her Archbishop of Canterbury, who succumbed to its fevers within twelve hours of his
sovereign’s passing.

Elizabeth had become the last of Henry’s disparate brood to occupy the throne of England. Many believed it was something of a miracle that she had lived long enough to wear the crown: no
wonder those words of praise to God for His infinite mercy were chosen as her first public reaction to her accession. Doubtless the phrases were carefully rehearsed beforehand, with a typical Tudor
eye to history’s judgement.

Her path to the throne had been perilous and strewn with lethal pitfalls.

Her despotic father’s obsessive infatuation with her feisty mother, driven by his restless longing for a lusty male heir, had been the root cause of a cataclysmic rupture with Rome that
created a renegade church in England in the 1530s which was briefly returned to papal authority during Mary’s reign. Henry’s fixation and its aftermath spawned decades of religious
discord that brutally cost the lives of hundreds of men and women who remained faithful to their creeds on both sides of the Catholic–Protestant divide.

Three months after Elizabeth’s birth (on 7 September 1533 at Greenwich Palace) she had been moved to Hatfield with her own household. She was joined there shortly afterwards by
seventeen-year-old Mary (the only child of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife Katherine of Aragon), who was now legally bastardised and formally stripped of her royal rank of princess because of the
divisive annulment of the king’s marriage with her mother.

Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk and uncle to Anne Boleyn, mischievously asked her on her arrival if she would like to ‘see and pay court to the princess’. Mary snapped back
defiantly that ‘she knew of no other princess in England but herself . . . The daughter of Madame de Pembroke [Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke before she became queen] is no
princess at all. This is a title that belongs to me by right and no one else.’ Mary lumped Elizabeth in with Henry’s bastard son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond (by Bessie Blount, one
of Katherine’s maids of honour); they were simply her illegitimate brother and sister. Did she have any message for the king? ‘None,’ said Mary, ‘except that the Princess of
Wales, his daughter, asks for his blessing.’ Norfolk dared not return to court with such a dangerous message; ‘Then go away and leave me alone,’ Mary ordered
imperiously.
⁵

One of the last times Elizabeth saw her mother was in January 1536, but as a toddler, she probably would not have retained any memory of her visit. News of Katherine of Aragon’s lonely
death, exiled in spartan Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, had been received joyously at Henry’s court. Queen Anne rewarded the messenger with ‘a handsome present’ and her
father, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, commented sardonically that it was a pity that Mary ‘did not keep company with her [mother]’. The then Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys
(never a friend to Elizabeth), reported that the king ‘sent for his Little Bastard and carrying her in his arms, he showed her first to one and then another’.
⁶

Those happy red-letter days withered on the tortured vine of Henry’s determination to safeguard the Tudor dynasty and his fury at being continually thwarted by his lack of sons. Despite
three pregnancies, the queen failed wretchedly in her primary duty: to deliver a healthy prince.

That year, Anne Boleyn was competently beheaded by a specially hired French executioner on Tower Green on Friday 19 May for treason, adultery and alleged incest with her brother George. Four
days before, Thomas Cranmer, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, had annulled Anne’s marriage with Henry, thus rendering Elizabeth, in her turn, a bastard. A new Act of Succession
decreed that as she was illegitimate, she was ‘utterly foreclosed,
excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir . . . to [the
king] by lineal descent’.
⁷
But nothing was ever certain during the Tudor period: a further Act of 1543 reinstated Elizabeth and Mary to the
succession and stipulated that if Edward died childless, the crown would pass to Mary. If she too died without issue, it would then pass on to Elizabeth.
⁸

Her education was directed by religiously reformist scholars from St John’s College, Cambridge and she later admitted to Mary ‘that she had never been taught the doctrine of the
ancient [Catholic] faith’.
⁹
Elizabeth became fluent in French, Italian, Greek and Latin, but she did not begin to study Spanish until her
twenties. When Henry died in January 1547, her priggish half-brother Edward, son of Henry’s third queen, Jane Seymour, wrote to her: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most
dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do . . . I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’
¹⁰

The radical Protestant policies of Edward VI’s short reign swept English and Welsh parish churches and cathedrals clean of popish imagery, opportunely recycling many of these fixtures and
fittings into hard cash for the young king’s embarrassingly empty exchequer. Daringly, Mary continued to hear Catholic Masses in her household and when told to cease and desist by
Edward’s outraged Privy Council, her reaction was predictably forthright:

After Edward’s death from a bizarre combination of tuberculosis, measles and the unhelpful ministrations of a ‘wise woman’, Mary determinedly saw off the
challenge of her half-brother’s preferred Protestant heir, Lady Jane Grey, and entered London in triumph as queen on 3 August 1553. She swiftly returned England to Catholicism, although
incongruously, she initially retained her father’s title of Supreme Head of the Church in England (until early 1554, when use of the title was phased out in official documents) and
early on continued to benefit from the sacrilegious sale of church goods.
¹²
Giovanni Michiel, the departing Venetian ambassador in
London, reported in 1557 that seven new monasteries had been opened;
¹³
‘the churches are frequented, the images replaced and all the ancient
Catholic rites and ceremonies performed as they used to be, the heretical being suppressed’.
¹⁴
‘Suppressed’ was too feeble or facile
a word to describe what was happening. Mary burned two hundred and eighty-three Protestants at the stake for refusing to recant their beliefs during just four years – hence history’s
pejorative soubriquet ‘Bloody Mary’.

On 8 September 1553, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth heard her first Mass but attended such services only erratically thereafter. The Spanish ambassador, Simon Renard,
believed her Catholic fervour was mere show and that her heart was not in her conversion. He reported acidly: ‘she complained loudly all the way to church and that her stomach ached’
and during the liturgy, she ‘wore a suffering air’.
¹⁵

Elizabeth was always her father’s daughter: characterised by the red hair; her imperious manner; the Tudor rages; the love of magnificence and of gaudy ceremony. Despite her mother’s
execution, she continued to cherish Henry’s memory and to model herself upon him. The princess, the Venetian envoy observed, ‘prides herself on her father and glories in him; everybody
says that she also resembles him more than the queen does’.
¹⁶

But Mary hated Elizabeth with a black sibling passion. She feared her as a younger rival waiting threateningly in the wings to wear the crown of England once she died or was deposed. Michiel was
well aware of the queen’s ‘evil disposition towards . . . my lady Elizabeth, which although dissembled, it cannot be denied that she displays in many ways the scorn and ill she bears
her’.
¹⁷
Mary’s suspicions intensified when she was faced by an uprising in 1554 over her projected marriage with Philip, son of the
Emperor Charles V of Spain. Mary’s Lord Chancellor, the sinister Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had led the religiously conservative party during Henry VIII’s reign, and now
feared Elizabeth would become the focal point of a Protestant resurgence. The prelate confided to Renard that ‘he had no hope of seeing the kingdom at peace’ while the princess lived
and he urged Mary to consign her to the Tower – even
before rumour had implicated her in the abortive Wyatt rebellion.

Gardiner’s unease was justified. On 14 March, thousands flocked to London’s Aldersgate Street to hear a miraculous ‘voice in the wall’ which when people cried ‘God
save Queen Mary’ stayed silent, but as the shouts changed to ‘God save the Lady Elizabeth’ it responded: ‘So be it!’ When one mischief-maker asked: ‘What is the
Mass?’ the ‘spirit’ replied: ‘Idolatry!’ The perpetrator of this hoax was Elizabeth Croft, ‘a wench about the age of eighteen’, who was imprisoned in the
Tower and subsequently executed:

Following the defeat of the rebels at the western gates of the City of London, the queen ordered Elizabeth to be taken to the Tower. To prevent the inevitable outbursts of
popular support that her progress through the city’s streets would incite, the Marquis of Winchester and the Earl of Sussex were instructed to convey Elizabeth to the fortress by boat.

Knowing her life now hung in the balance, she immediately wrote a heartfelt, pleading letter to her sister in her neat, easily read italic handwriting:

Fearing that she might be incriminated by the surreptitious addition of a forged postscript, Elizabeth wisely scored a diagonal line across the blank two-thirds of a page at the
end of her letter.

While she was writing to Mary, ‘the tide rose so high that it was no longer possible to pass under London Bridge’ from Westminster to the Tower – so her grim journey by river
was postponed to the next day, Palm Sunday, 18 March.
²⁰
En route, Elizabeth was almost tipped into the water as her boat shot the race through one of
the nineteen arches of the medieval London Bridge. She flatly refused to disembark at the Tower’s privy stairs and sat down in protest at her arrest, announcing, ‘It is better sitting
here than in a worse place.’
²¹
It was raining hard and perhaps it was the inclement weather rather than the entreaties of her discomfited
escorts that finally persuaded her to struggle out of the boat declaring: ‘Here lands as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed [here].’ Entering across the drawbridge, the
sight of the forbidding grey outer walls, dwarfed by the White Tower within, terrified her. She believed that she would now suffer the same fate as her mother had there eighteen years earlier. Her
fears were magnified when she passed the scaffold on Tower Green on which Lady Jane Grey had been beheaded five weeks before.